Jeff Barr, spokesperson for Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), has become too busy to keep up his detailed AWS Week in Review blog posts. The task has been made an open source project on GitHub. Barr is looking for contributions.
Barr, who basically announces all things AWS-related on the company’s main blog site has been doing the AWS Week in Review posts starting in the spring 2012. It took just 5 minutes.
He said that “Unfortunately, finding, saving, filtering and then generating these posts took a substantial amount time.” “I reluctantly quit writing new posts early in the year after spending approximately 4 hours on the post for April 25th.”
This led to a lot of questions about the series, so it has now become a community effort.
Barr stated that the AWS Week in Review has become a GitHub project. “I invite contributors (AWS users, bloggers, and partners) to contribute. Every Monday morning, I will review and accept pull request for the previous week. The Week in Review will be published by 10 a.m. PST.
“In order for the posts to be focused and highly valuable, I will only approve pull requests if they conform to our style and content guidelines. I will create a file for the next week at that point, so you can add new content as it becomes available.
AWS is looking for advice on other aspects of the blog series. This includes its design and advice about how to use the Git style collaboration.
Barr provided content and style guidelines and described the sections of his post, including daily summaries and upcoming events. Barr also shared how he finds news by scanning sites like Reddit and Hackernews and performing GitHub searches.
He said that it was possible for groups or individuals to become the primary contributors over time. This is fine and I would love to see it happen. I am open to the addition of new sections as long as they are relevant to AWS.
Barr stated that it is not necessary to use text editors or shell commands to participate. Potential contributors only need to create a GitHub account.
Today’s post marked the first community-driven Week in Review write up. Barr stated that nine other contributors made this post possible. “That’s a great beginning; let’s hope we can get 20 this week.”
