Marketing for build.jobs

[ericholscher]

This is an announcement post for this feature. It can highlight some of the docs we've already written, and inline some of the neat examples we've figured out.

[ericholscher]

Initial push: https://twitter.com/readthedocs/status/1519363742869295105

[humitos]

@ericholscher besides the post written in #162 is there anything else required here? do you have something else in mind?

[ericholscher]

@humitos I think keeping sharing examples on Twitter would be great. Perhaps even tweeting each example in our docs as a code example once every couple days? What else could we do to promote this work? Can we do a short 5 minute video? Can we do a blog post showing something cool that can be done with it, just for fun (that HN would love?).

I feel like there's a ton of interesting things we could be doing to promote this work. I'd love to get it on HN if possible. Though everyone on HN will I'm sure hate on it, it will get the word out much more widely than our Twitter can.

[humitos]

I did a quick research to know how people are using build.jobs and opened https://github.com/readthedocs/meta/discussions/23 to track that usage. From there, we can create more examples and get more ideas for promotion.

[ericholscher]

This is probably done-ish? We need some more concrete tasks here I think, instead of this placeholder.

[humitos]

The initial work is done, yes. We talked about keeping tweeting about this and finding more examples of good usage. I took another look at how people are using build.jobs but I didn't find anything super interesting to tweet about. Most of our users are either using the examples we have documented or some hacky custom solution they need for their use case that other users probably won't benefit from seeing them.

I updated the discussion with the latest example that I found, and I also took a look at build.commands --where I didn't find any real good usage we can comment about either.

So far we have:

• documentation page: https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/build-customization.html
• blog post: https://blog.readthedocs.com/user-defined-build-jobs/
• announcing tweet: https://twitter.com/readthedocs/status/1527234995001040898
• tweet with an example: https://twitter.com/readthedocs/status/1527234995001040898

[humitos]

I updated the meta discussion with the new findings. Nothing too interesting to promote 😄 . I think we can call this work done for now and keep updating that meta discussion with more relevant use cases. Besides promoting them when finding something interesting, that data will help us to understand more our users and their use cases in the future, and make better decisions about how the new build system / contract / metadata / etc will work.

[ericholscher]

Yea, I think we can definitely be doing more to market it, but we need specific tasks.