Contributing

OnDataEngineering is an open collaborative site, and lives on your contributions and participation in the community around the site. So welcome, it’s good to see you - can we suggest that a good place to start is the site information for more details on who we are and what we’re trying to do.

And before you go any further, can we ask you to sign up to our Discourse forums. You’ll get updates on changes to the site, notifications of popular discussions, and can use this to discuss anything relating to this site including how you can help and contribute. While you’re there, please take a read of the welcome post.

Once you’ve done that, we’d welcome your help in building out the content on this site and making it a fantastic resource. All submission of content is welcomed, and we pride ourselves on being friendly and welcoming place if you want to get involved. The following are a number of ways you can contribute:

  1. Discuss the contents of any page or blog post by clicking on the discuss button next to the page title or the link in the sidebar. Your thoughts, comments and feedback on what’s written on this site will make it’s content better.

  2. If you see typos, errors or omissions, or have information to add, edit the contents of any page by clicking on the edit button next to the page title or the link in the sidebar. This is literally a 30 second process for submitting changes, and will help make the contents of this site better. These edit links will take you to a GitHub edit page (you’ll need to login or create a login to GitHub first) - make your changes, fill in a description of your change in the form at the bottom of the page and click “Propose the change”, and then on the next screen click “Create pull request” twice and you’re done.

  3. As well as editing pages, you can also create new pages by clicking on the create button next to the page title or the link in the sidebar on the main index pages (for example here). The process is exactly the same as editing a page.

  4. If you have any industry news you think we should be aware of then please send it to us as news@ondataengineering.net. We follow the blogs and web pages listed in the News sections on each technology page, but there’s always a chance we’ll miss stuff, and we may not hear about technologies not yet listed on the site.

  5. With blog posts, feel free to correct typos or mistakes. If you have a blog post you’d like us to host please feel free to send us one via a pull request, however it’s worth getting in touch first via e-mail or the discussion forums, and we reserve the right to only take blog posts we feel are a good fit (posts trying to push specific technologies or copies of posts from elsewhere are generally not). Blog posts should be thought pieces; if you have factual information that fits elsewhere in the site please contribute it there.

  6. If the GitHub create and edit pages are a bit limited for you, using git and your favourite text editor is surprisingly straightforward. The GitHub guides (especially the Hello World and Forking Projects ones) and the GitHub help pages are great places to start, and we use Visual Studio Code (which is completely free and has great git integration) with the markdownlint and SpellChcker plugins.

All the content of this site is written in Markdown. If you’re new to it, Mardown Tutorial is a great place to start. We use the kramdown flavour - see the quick reference and syntax.

Oh, and we reserve the right to use the (correct) British spellings of words here, although we won’t object to people using new fangled alternative spellings.