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Comment by haberman | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've gotten pretty good at is taking some question I have about some software and answering it by looking through the source. I've wondered whether people would find it interesting if I showed the process of how I do this.

I've wondered whether YouTube might be a good medium for this. Blog articles feel kind of "produced" -- I thought it might be cool to capture the exploratory nature of how this works.

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Please go blog for this. I can read a blog anywhere. I don't need headphones. I can pause just by looking away. I can read text at my own pace and look things up. I can even print it out and add notes.

You can add the investigative process you used to get there, and note what didn't work and why.

I'm the same way: take a question and answer with the source. But as my time gets more and more constrained, I wish more large open-source projects had design docs akin to CockroachDB. I read through the CDB design doc in one sitting, then read the source and it was such a treat to have that high-level context while wading through the details.

I can't say the same thing for ElasticSearch (or most large open-source projects). It's very difficult to get the high-level context without a well-written design doc explaining why things are the way they are. Some parts of ElasticSearch make sense, and other parts just seem hackneyed. Of course, I could pull together little bits and pieces of high-level insight from multiple disparate blog posts and forums and mailing lists here and there.

But what I would like is a design doc! If you were to produce something along the lines of that for open-source projects that need it, I wouldn't hesitate to pay a modest fee.

  > If you were to produce something along the lines of that 
  > for open-source projects that need it, I wouldn't hesitate 
  > to pay a modest fee.

Try BountySource [1] maybe?

There you can post a proposal for some improvement to an OSS project (a design doc, in your case) and pledge a bounty for it.

If other people have the same problem, they might chip in further, making it more visible/profitable to solve.

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[1] https://www.bountysource.com/

Thanks for the link! First time I've seen that marketplace. I'll look into it.

Postgres actually has a lot of that kind of documentation in the form of README files in source directories.

Absolutely! Postgres has amazing documentation.

My comment was directed towards other projects. I wish they would follow Postgres's lead.

I'd be really interested to see something like this. YouTube probably is the best medium for showing content like this. I can think of a few examples of "expert" coders showing how they work through typical development scenarios, but can't remember coming across anything like this for postgres.

As a mathematician trying to enter the world of software engineering I think this would be a useful resource!

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