Read the Docs goes full-time

We have some exciting news in Read the Docs land this week. The project has been accepted into the Portland Incubator Experiment, as an open source project. This means that we have office space provided to us in Portland for three months, where we will be working on Read the Docs full-time. There will be two of us working on this: Eric Holscher and Anthony Johnson.

Note

Because we now have amazing office space, you can drop by and hack with us any time. We will be in Downtown Portland every weekday. Come work on Read the Docs with us!

This is a fantastic opportunity for the project. Having two engineers working on it for three months will enable us to build a lot of useful things. This week is the first week, and we have already triaged the entire issue tracker and launched a few new features.

New Features

Historically, we haven’t had a great way to announce new features. We would tweet them from the @readthedocs account, and hope people followed us. This isn’t a great format for showing new things.

Today we are announcing a new blog: http://blog.readthedocs.com/ We will be doing regular feature announcements on the blog as we build them. There are a number of recently released features that we’ll be highlighting there. If reading on the web isn’t your thing, you can also choose to get that content via RSS or email:

Adding new features to the project is great in the short term, but something like Read the Docs needs support for the long term. To be able to continue doing Read the Docs, we have decided to spend this time figuring out how to make the project sustainable.

Sustainability

We hope at the end of three months that Read the Docs is a sustainable open source project. We will have more information on this front in the next few weeks, as we figure out what our sustainability model will look like. The goal is that we will be able to create new features and support hosting the project for years to come. If you have thoughts on good ways to do this, feel free to email me.

We really believe in the mission and potential of Read the Docs to improve the state of documentation in software, and we are happy with how far we’ve come. However, this is just the beginning, and we look forward to building the future with you.



Hey there! I'm Eric and I work on communities in the world of software documentation. Feel free to email me if you have comments on this post!