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Guides

Expert developers and teams share best practices in software engineering, collaboration, and culture.

Monica Powell // Newsela

Brag now, remember later: Document your accomplishments

In Part Four of her series, Monica shows how you are in a unique position to be your best advocate.

Shared learnings from leaders in the open source community

Software development should be accessible for both novices and seasoned professionals alike. From trending topics and technologies to best-practices, community contributions empower us to learn from experts and build better, together.

John Allspaw // Adaptive Capacity Labs

What we talk about when we talk about ‘root cause’

It’s a lot more nuanced than you might think.

Juan Pablo Buriticá

The good, the bad, and the ugly of making decisions in open source

Using RFCs to support decision-making when working in public.

Jon Parise // Pinterest

Knowing when to say 'no'

Recognize which contributions are a good fit for the project—and which are not.

Monica Powell // Newsela

Your future self will thank you: Building your personal documentation

In Part Three of this series, Monica explains how to build a second brain of knowledge you’ll use over and over.

Scott Triglia // Stripe

Using ‘Roofshots’ to make impossible decisions

A developer superpower to tackle complicated projects.

Monica Powell // Newsela

How to hone your new superpower: teaching

In part two of Monica's series on the value of documentation, she discusses the mindset, process and benefits of public documentation.

James Turnbull // Sotheby's

Optimize local dev environments for better onboarding

Empower your new engineers to hit the ground running.

Tasha Drew // VMware

Charming Pirates: Reframing user acquisition and referral for OSS

A proposal for strategically growing open source project maintainership.

Monica Powell // Newsela

Using code as documentation to save time and share context

In part one of her series, Monica shares how to do documentation to help yourself and others.

Anthony Sottile // Stripe

Code review is too late for code quality

Let the computers fight the style war so you can focus on what really matters.

Melanie Ensign // Discernible

Effective communication is not about what you say

How to craft the messages people need to hear to get the right results.

Colby Fayock // Applitools

Overcoming human error with code automation and testing

From linting to deployment, here’s how to use automation to cut back grunt work and maximize fun.

David Noël-Romas // Stripe

Time management for makers

As makers, software engineers should adopt these seven essential habits.

Cassidy Williams // Netlify

Get your first software developer job

Tips, tricks, and general advice for how to get in the door in tech.

Jerome Hardaway // Vets Who Code

Teaching in public with GitHub

Uplift others by sharing your knowledge.

Gina Häußge

A dev’s guide to open source software licensing

A crash course in licensing.

Kevin Riggle

How to write an internal production failure incident communication

What do you say when the system is down?

Angie Jones // Applitools

Demystifying developer advocacy

A seasoned developer advocate's answers to the most common DevRel FAQs.

Joe Lust // mabl

Walking the walk: bringing end-to-end automation and testing to internal teams

On creating streamlined workflows and a seamless developer experience with built-in CI/CD.

Austin Hemmelgarn // Netdata

Connected by collaboration: unifying DevOps and open source

On building a developer-first release process for all: remote teams, enterprise users, and the open source community.

Kevin Mo // Front

Boosting speed and scalability with continuous deployments

Why building fast means balancing risk and practicality—from infrastructure migration to project management.

George Swan // Autodesk

Transforming productivity with a ‘whole product’ CI/CD pipeline

How a shift towards innersource and shared best practices unified teams on a single DevOps pipeline.

About The
ReadME Project

Coding is usually seen as a solitary activity, but it’s actually the world’s largest community effort led by open source maintainers, contributors, and teams. These unsung heroes put in long hours to build software, fix issues, field questions, and manage communities.

The ReadME Project is part of GitHub’s ongoing effort to amplify the voices of the developer community. It’s an evolving space to engage with the community and explore the stories, challenges, technology, and culture that surround the world of open source.

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