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Home > Coder Catchup > Episode 025 - The Importance of a Good Readme
Podcast: Coder Catchup
Episode:

Episode 025 - The Importance of a Good Readme

Category: Technology
Duration: 00:07:27
Publish Date: 2015-06-29 16:45:00
Description:

Why:
Onboarding new developers
Remembering how to continue work on the project yourself

What to include:

  • Who has contributed, their contact details, etc
  • What dependencies the project has, e.g. imagemagick, postgres, etc
  • How to get the project bootstrapped and ready for development locally
  • How to deploy the project into production
  • Running tests
  • Third party services
  • How to contribute/features (this probably should belong in a different file)
  • Build status etc
  • Overview of the project, what is trying to achieve, etc.

How to get started?

  • Use a service such as http://readme.io/
  • Check out what some large OSS projects you use do
  • Always think that someone else will have to use and setup your project (even yourself much much later on)
  • https://github.com/pixelstack/essential-readme-template

Summary

  • Good readme docs save your sanity
  • Always think like someone else will have to take over or contribute to the project
  • It does not have to be perfect, it can be updated
Total Play: 0