Documentation Application

[glenmurie]

Position: Documentation Manager

Do you understand that Wildfire Games is a non-commercial project, work for 0 A.D. is volunteer, and work is done for free?

Yes

Do you agree to distribute all your work for Wildfire Games under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license?

Yes

Name: Glen Murie

Email: glenmurie(at) gmail(dot) com

Google Talk:

glenmurie(at) gmail(dot) com

I can get an account with a different IM service if you need me to.

Location:

Madison, WI - Central Time

Availability:

I'll be able to contribute about ten hours per week.

Age:

42

Occupation:

Software Support and Documentation

Skills and Experience:

I have both an Associates Degree in Computer Science, and a B.S. in Technical Communications.

I write for a hobby, and I started, but am no longer involved with, a website called the Battle College. The Battle College had a set of articles that I wrote for a miniatures game called Warmachine. By the time I'd shut down the site due to lack of time and money, I'd written hundreds of strategy and tactics articles. The site was more popular than I realized, and was revived from Wayback archives and Google caches as a wiki by a group of volunteers.

I have written documentation and short manuals for my current and previous employers. I wrote the iPhone manual on this web page: https://www.emdat.com/software/mobile.asp

I also write fiction as a hobby, and you can see an example of that here: http://privateerpressforums.com/showthread.php?70786-Never-Retired

Some more of my writing is on my website at www.geeksdelight.com

Motivation:

I enjoy writing, and I want to get involved in an open source project because there is too little writing work available with my employer. I want to get involved with something that will motivate me to write more than I do now. I would like to get involved in the coding aspects of an OSS project, but my skills at coding are not as good as my writing skills.

Personality:

I am a creative person who likes learning new things, sharing knowledge, and teaching others.

Short Essay:

I discovered 0 A.D. when it became the SourceForge project of the month, and it looks like an amazing game. I'm a big fan of the Civilization games, and I think it would be fun to get involved with 0 A.D. I also want to use this as an opportunity to hone my writing skills.

Interests and Hobbies:

I divide my time equally between taking care of my twin daughters, miniatures wargaming, painting minatures, and bicycling. Every year I go to GenCon Indy and work as a painting instructor at the Paint and Take.

Staff:

I do not know anyone on the Wildfire team.

Community:

www.privateerpressforums.com

Favorite Game:

My favorite game is Warmachine/Hordes, a tabletop miniatures game. My favorite video game of all time is the Fallout series. Currently, I'm playing a lot of Skyrim and Little Big Planet.

Work Examples:

I have links to examples of my work above; under Skills and Experience.

[feneur]

Hello Glen, thank you for your application. Would you say you're comfortable with writing more technical documentation? I'm asking because we've already got a guy who's more comfortable working with more user oriented documentation (like the gameplay manual etc) and it would be nice if you could complement each other

[glenmurie]

Hello Glen, thank you for your application. Would you say you're comfortable with writing more technical documentation? I'm asking because we've already got a guy who's more comfortable working with more user oriented documentation (like the gameplay manual etc) and it would be nice if you could complement each other

I can do more technical documentation, yes. I assume we're talking about documenting the code, or writing manuals for the other contributors. I have some programming experience, just not a lot of programming experience.

[feneur]

The actual code is pretty well documented (at least as far as I know, I'm not a programmer so I can't tell too well/don't look at it too much ), so what's needed is mostly the introductory stuff/overview. If you look at the main Trac page it's the things below http://trac.wildfiregames.com/#Forprogrammers: which I'm talking about As you can see there are a lot of "Outdated" notices, so there's a lot of work to do. Part of the work is being done by the programmers over time, but where a documentation manager would come in would partly be to encourage the programmers to be more active in documenting things (the more technical things specifically as it's easier for the one working on it, and most importantly the new things they work on as it's best to have it documented asap before they forget things ) and partly to make sure that the documentation is organised in a way that makes sense both for newcomers and people who have been with the project for a long time. And of course as you say to keep the basic documentation up-to-date so new programmers can get into development as soon and easily as possible (and there it might actually be a good thing that you are not too experienced as a programmer as you will have easier asking the beginner questions that the documentation should answer

If this sounds interesting to you I'd like to have a quick chat with you to get to know you a bit. Do any particular days work better for you? You living a fair bit to the west in the US might make it a bit harder for us to find some good times, but we should be able to find some day that works for both of us

[glenmurie]

I work Monday to Friday from 10AM to 7PM Central Time. If you're in Sweden that puts it at 5AM to 2PM Central time your time, so I could chat at about 4PM or so your time during the week, or any time on the weekend.

[feneur]

I think you may misunderstand in which direction Sweden is from you (we're GMT+2 during the summer and Central Daylight time is -5, in other words I'm 7 hours ahead of you ), so during the weekend would probably be the best.

[MishFTW]

Here is neat time table/chart. Hope it helps.

[feneur]

We already talked, but thanks