Forge Your Future with Open Source

Styleguides

While you should definitely keep things as simple as possible at launch time, styleguides are one piece of complexity you may wish to add. You may not have thought about it very much yet, but I suspect you have some pretty strong opinions on how code, documentation, design, usability, accessibility, or other elements of a project should be done. If you don’t tell people about these preferences up front before they start to contribute, you’ll likely find that the first contribution you receive will be in a style that grates on your nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. Why subject yourself to that—and the contributor to having to re-style their contribution—if you can avoid it by writing up a simple styleguide or two?

The key word ...