Springwolf has reached a point, where it supports essential use-cases and provides great value to users that don’t want to write (much) documentation themselves. Now it’s time to expand our user base by promoting the project.
Zenika open source has a great guide on improving open source projects. Over the past months we’ve been working on making Springwolf better to build a solid foundation. One of the next suggestions is to write an article.
Why Baeldung
In the Java (JVM) and particular Spring Boot world, Baeldung is one of the largest websites1 showing high value articles and tutorials on common programming questions and usage of libraries.
To me, it provides an easy to understand introduction to many (advanced) topics. While standard documentation shows one way to solving a problem, Baeldung articles typically compare multiple options. Also, the reader can follow along the tutorials step by step and dive deeper into code when needed.
Contacting the Baeldung Team
After an initial contact message, they got in touch and we worked out the idea as well as a timeline. We got the login credentials and started writing.
Writing the Initial Draft
We wrote the article in WordPress, which also comes along with some assistance to write in a common style. Baeldung has documented all the details of language style, code formatting, how to use code snippets and much more. That’s a great to ensure that the new article matches the existing articles avoid later review rewrites.
At the same time as writing the article, we wrote the supporting tutorial code.
Improving the Draft Version
With the first draft ready, we transitioned the JIRA task to In Review and after a couple interactions of implementing feedback we arrived at a final version ready for review by another editor.
And after their approval, they publish the article on the main website.
The Article Is Online
The Baeldung team handled everything from here and then it happened: On Thursday morning, the 13th of July 2023, the article is online. The work of 2 month is visible to the world. Yay.
Reflection
Writing for Baeldung has been a great experience. They’re well organized and made it easy to contribute an article - even for new authors. Thank you Saajan Nagendra for helping and guiding us through the process.
Sadly, the author is only credited when multiple articles are published. Until then, the article’s public author is the generic baeldung user.
For me, the biggest learning is to focus on a good command of the English language and writing in a predefined style. One particular example is the capitalization of headings, as well as to pay attention to avoid passive voice.
Most importantly, the article is already having an impact. Running manual (and subjective) tests, Springwolf2 ranks higher in the results of search engines. Moreover, we see more traffic on the website and on GitHub. The amount of GitHub stargazers has peeked and there is more activity on GitHub issues - an indicator that people are trying out Springwolf.
And the best part: With more and more people finding the Baeldung article and finding Springwolf, we expect a continuous stream of new users.