Topics to include in the developer guide

[bourque]

The purpose of this issue is to maintain a running list of topics we wish to eventually document in this developer guide. Each of these topics should eventually have their own GitHub issue to allow for more focused discussion and development. This list is expected to change/evolve as this effort progresses!

Already Exists Somewhere

• Licensing Guidelines
• Docker/containerization Guidelines
• GitHub / Open Source Guidelines
• NetCDF Formatting Guidelines
• Web Team Best Practices
• Python Best Practices
• Python Environment Management Guidelines
• Python Packaging and Distribution Guidelines
• Generative AI Tools at LASP

Definite

• Version Control (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc.)
• git workflow (Forking workflow, Branching workflow, etc.)
• CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, etc.)
• Code of Conduct
• Versioning (semantic, time-based, etc.)
• API Documentation (OpenAPI, etc.)
• Unit Testing
• Accessibility Standards
• Data Formats
• Publishing and Citation

Maybe

• Issue Tracking (GitHub, JIRA, etc.)
• Software Environment Management (Poetry, Conda, etc.)
• Installation and Usage documentation
• Security
• Release workflows (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, etc.)
• Logging

Nice to Have

• SDC Architectures
• Dependency Updates
• Slack communication/culture
• Training catalog

[kjbrooks]

One thing I think we are missing is documentation best practices. I would personally like to enforce some internal documentation standards (yes, I am going to consciously use "standards" here), but that can be a "maybe", while documentation for repos should be a "definite". We have wildly different documentation for repos in DS and most of them are not informative, at best.