opensource.google.com

Menu

Posts from October 2018

Google Code-in 2018 contest for teenagers begins today

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Today marks the start of the 9th consecutive year of Google Code-in (GCI). This is the biggest and best contest ever and we hope you’ll join us for the fun!

What is Google Code-in?

Our global, online contest introducing students to open source development. The contest runs for 7 weeks until December 12, 2018.

Who can register?

Pre-university students ages 13-17 that have their parent or guardian’s permission to register for the contest.

How do students register and participate?

Students can register for the contest beginning today at g.co/gci. Once students have registered and the parental consent form has been submitted and approved by Program Administrators students can choose which contest “task” they want to work on first. Students choose the task they find interesting from a list of thousands of available tasks created by 27 participating open source organizations. Tasks take an average of 3-5 hours to complete. There are even beginner tasks that are a wonderful way for students to get started in the contest.

The task categories are:
  • Coding
  • Design
  • Documentation/Training
  • Outreach/Research
  • Quality Assurance

Why should students participate?

Students not only have the opportunity to work on a real open source software project, thus gaining invaluable skills and experience, but they also have the opportunity to be a part of the open source community. Mentors are readily available to help answer their questions while they work through the tasks.

Google Code-in is a contest so there are prizes! Complete one task and receive a digital certificate, three completed tasks and you’ll also get a fun Google t-shirt. Finalists earn the coveted hoodie. Grand Prize winners (2 from each organization) will receive a trip to Google headquarters in California!

Details

Over the last 8 years, more than 8,100 students from 107 countries have successfully completed over 40,000 tasks in GCI. Curious? Learn more about GCI by checking out the Contest Rules and FAQs. And please visit our contest site and read the Getting Started Guide.

Teachers, if you are interested in getting your students involved in Google Code-in we have resources available to help you get started.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Building great open source documentation

Monday, October 15, 2018

When developers use, choose, and contribute to open source software, effective documentation can make all the difference between a positive experience or a negative experience.

In fact, a 2017 GitHub survey that “Incomplete or Confusing Documentation” is the top complaint about open source software, TechRepublic writes “Ask a developer what her primary gripes with open source are, and documentation gets top billing, and by a wide margin.”

Technical writers across Google are addressing this issue, starting with open source projects in Google Cloud. We'll be sharing what we learn along the way and are excited to offer this brief guide as a starting point.

Open source software documentation

Providing effective documentation for open source software can build strong, inclusive communities and increase the usage of your product. The same factors that encourage collaborative development in open source projects can have the same positive results with documentation. Open source software provides unique ways to create effective documentation.

When software is open sourced, users are regarded as contributors and can access the source code and the documentation. They’re encouraged to submit additions, fix code, report bugs, and update documentation. Having more contributors can increase the rate at which software and documentation evolve.


The best way to accelerate software adoption is to describe its benefits and demonstrate how to use it. The benefits of timely, effective, and accurate content are numerous. Because documentation can save enough time and money to pay for itself, it:
  • Helps to create inclusive communities
  • Makes for a better software product
  • Promotes product adoption 
  • Reduces cost of ownership
  • Reduces the user’s learning curve
  • Makes for happy users
  • Improves the user interface
When documentation is inadequate, the opposite can occur. Incorrect, old, or missing documentation can:
  • Waste time
  • Cause errors and destroy data
  • Turn away customers
  • Increase support costs
  • Shorten a product’s life span

Why supplying effective documentation can be such a challenge

Useful documentation takes time to write and must be updated with the software. Did the installation process change? Are there better ways to configure performance? Was the user interface modified? Were new features introduced? Updates like these must be explained to new and existing customers.

It’s not enough to add words to a file and call it documentation.

How many times have you tried to use documentation that was five years out-of-date? How long did it take you to find another solution? (Not long, right?) Using old documentation can be like hiking an overgrown trail. The prospects of rogue branches, poison ivy, and getting lost suggest you are unlikely to emerge unscathed.

At first blush, writing documentation may seem optional. However, as a developer, you can literally be so close to your product that you take its features and purpose for granted. But your customers have no idea what you know, or how to apply what you know to address their business challenges. And time is money.

Remember the swimmer who got halfway across the English Channel only to say, “I’m tired,” before turning around and swimming back to shore? Ignoring the need for documentation is like that. Developing a software product gets you some of the way to your goal whereas helpful documentation fulfills your goal.

Momentum matters a lot. If you can settle into a rhythm of implementing new features, fixing bugs in the code, as well as writing and updating documentation, you can propel yourself to success.

Create an inclusive open source community

In the same GitHub survey referenced above, 95% of the respondents were men but evidence suggests that clear documentation:
  • Can contribute to inclusive communities
  • Is more highly valued by those groups who are typically under-represented
Documentation that effectively explains a project's processes, such as contributing to guides and defining codes of conduct, is valued more by groups that are underrepresented in the open source community, such as women.

Factors that can lead to ineffective documentation

Conditions like these almost always compromise the quality of documentation:
  • Belief that it’s enough for open source software to just work.
  • Notion that a specification is as good as instructional text.
  • Idea that casual unreviewed contributions are sufficient.
  • Belief that unscheduled and unspecified software updates are acceptable.
  • Minimal to no style guidelines.

Conquer your documentation challenges

Use these best practices to provide helpful and timely documentation:

1. Identify common terminology

Define and influence the usage and adoption of terminology for your open source project. Use the same terminology in the guides and in the product. Involving a writer early in product development can lead to a natural synergy between the user interface, guides, and training materials.

With clear definitions of terms and consistent usage in the documentation, you can teach your community to speak a common language. As a result, everyone in your products’ ecosystem can communicate more effectively with each other.

2. Provide contribution guidelines

Opensource.com describes exactly why contribution guidelines are so important. Consider how Kubernetes describes the types of documentation contributions your users can make and how to make them.

3. Create a documentation template

To make sure your contributors provide details in a consistent format, consider providing a document template to capture details for common topics such as:
  • Overview
  • Prerequisites
  • Procedural steps
  • What’s next

4. Document new and updated features

When a feature is added or updated, ask that it be documented. You can even provide guidelines to capture key information. Initially, some may think it cumbersome to require that  instructions be provided early in the development process. However, think of documentation to be like testing in that nobody really wants to do it but things work so much better. Sufficient testing and teaching are good for quality and momentum.

Code reviewers and maintainers of open source software have power. Code reviewers can (and should) withhold approval until documentation is sufficient.

Remember, not all changes require documentation updates. Here’s a good rule of thumb:

If an update to a project will require users to change their behavior, then documentation updates may be required.

If not, how will your customers find the new feature you worked so hard to implement? Said another way, if a change doesn't require tests, it probably doesn't require docs, either. Use your best judgement. For example, code refactoring and experimental tweaks need not be tested or documented.

As always, simplify and automate this process as much as possible. At Google, teams can enforce a presubmit check that either looks for a flag that indicates a doc update isn't necessary (presubmit checks for style issues can prevent a lot of arguments, too). We also allow owners of a file to submit changes without a review.

If your team balks at this requirement, remind them that simple project documentation is about sharing the information you have in your head so that many others can access it later without bothering you.

Documentation updates aren't typically onerous! The size of your documentation change scales with the size of your pull request (PR). If your PR contains a thousand lines of code, you may need to write a few hundred lines of documentation. If the PR contains a one-line change, you may need to change a word or two.

Finally, remember that documentation needn’t be perfect, but instead fit for use. What's most important is that key information is clearly conveyed.

5. Conduct regular freshness reviews

At least every quarter, review and update your content. Many hands make for many voices, many typos, and many inconsistencies. Don’t let content persist unchecked for years without periodically confirming it’s still useful.

In conclusion, success breeds success. By effectively documenting open source software, everybody wins.

We hope you'll put this guidance to work and help your open source project become even more successful! We'd love to hear from you if you do, or if you have questions or useful advice to share.

By Janet Davies, Google OpenDocs

Outline: secure access to the open web

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Censorship and surveillance are challenges that many journalists around the world face on a daily basis. Some of them use a virtual private network (VPN) to provide safer access to the open internet, but not all VPNs are equally reliable and trustworthy, and even fewer are open source.

That’s why Jigsaw created Outline, a new open source, independently audited platform that lets any organization easily create and operate their own VPN.

Outline’s most striking feature is arguably how easy it is to use. An organization starts by downloading the Outline Manager app, which lets them sign in to DigitalOcean, where they can host their own VPN, and set it up with just a few clicks. They can also easily use other cloud providers, provided they have shell access to run the installation script. Once an Outline server is set up, the server administrator can create access credentials and share with their network of contacts, who can then use the Outline clients to connect to it.


A core element to any VPN’s security is the protocol that the server and clients use to communicate. When we looked at the existing protocols, we realized that many of them were easily identifiable by network adversaries looking to spot and block VPN traffic. To make Outline more resilient against this threat, we chose Shadowsocks, a secure, handshake-less, and open source protocol that is known for its strength and performance, and enjoys the support of many developers worldwide. Shadowsocks is a combination of a simplified SOCKS5-like routing protocol, running on top of an encrypted channel. We chose the AEAD_CHACHA20_POLY1305 cipher, which is an IETF standard and provides the security and performance users need.

Another important component to security is running up-to-date software. We package the server code as a Docker image, enabling us to run on multiple platforms, and allowing for automatic updates using Watchtower. On DigitalOcean installations, we also enable automatic security updates on the host machine.

If security is one of the most critical parts of creating a better VPN, usability is the other. We wanted Outline to offer a consistent, simple user experience across platforms, and for it to be easy for developers around the world to contribute to it. With that in mind, we use the cross-platform development framework Apache Cordova for Android, iOS, macOS and ChromeOS, and Electron for Windows. The application logic is a web application written in TypeScript, while the networking code had to be written in native code for each platform. This setup allows us to reutilize most of code, and create consistent user experiences across diverse platforms.

In order to encourage a robust developer community we wanted to strike a balance between simplicity, reproducibility, and automation of future contributions. To that end, we use Travis for continuous builds and to generate the binaries that are ultimately uploaded to the app stores. Thanks to its cross-platform support, any team member can produce a macOS or Windows binary with a single click. We also use Docker to package the build tools for client platforms, and thanks to Electron, developers familiar with the server's Node.js code base can also contribute to the Outline Manager application.

You can find our code in the Outline GitHub repositories and more information on the Outline website. We hope that more developers join the project to build technology that helps people connect to the open web and stay more safe online.

By Vinicius Fortuna, Jigsaw
.