Read the Docs Team

readthedocs.org is the largest open source documentation hosting service. It’s provided as a free service to the open source community, and is worked on by a community of volunteers that we’re hoping to expand! We currently serve over 20,000,000 pageviews a month, and we hope to maintain a reliable and stable hosting platform for years to come.

There are three major parts of this work:

Note

You may notice that a number of names appear on multiple teams. This is because we are lacking contributors. So please be bold and contact us, and we’ll get you sorted into the right team.

Support Team

Read the Docs has thousands of users who depend on it everyday. Every day at least one of them has an issue that needs to be addressed by a site admin. This might include tasks like:

  • Resetting a password
  • Asking for a project name to be released
  • Troubleshooting build errors

Members

Feel free to ask any of us if you have questions or want to join!

Joining

The best place to start would be to start addressing some of the issues in our issue tracker. We have our support policies quite well documented in our Contributing to Read the Docs. Be bold. Start trying to reproduce issues that people have, or talk to them to get more information. After you get the hang of things, we’ll happily give you the ability to tag and close issues by joining our Support Team.

Operations Team

readthedocs.org is a service that millions of people depend on each month. As part of operating the site, we maintain a 24/7 on-call rotation. This means that folks have to be available and have their phone in service.

Members

Feel free to ask any of us if you have questions or want to join!

Joining

We are always looking for more people to share the on-call responsibility. If you are on-call for your job already, we’d love to piggy back on that duty as well.

You can email us at dev@readthedocs.org if you want to join our operations team. Because of the sensitive nature (API tokens, secret keys, SSL certs, etc.) of the work, we keep a private GitHub repository with the operations code & documentation.

The tools that we use are:

  • Salt
  • Nagios
  • Graphite/Grafana
  • Nginx
  • Postgres
  • Django
  • Celery

It’s fine if you aren’t familiar with all of these things, but are willing to help with part of it!

Please reach out if you want to share the on-call responsibility. It really is an important job, and we’d love to have it be more geographically distributed.

Development Team

Also known as the “Core Team” in other projects. These folks have the ability to commit code to the project.

Members

Feel free to ask any of us if you have questions or want to join!

Joining

We try to be pretty flexible with who we allow on the development team. The best path is to send a few pull requests, and follow up to make sure they get merged successfully. You can check out our Contributing to Read the Docs to get more information, and find issues that need to be addressed. After that, feel free to ask for a commit bit.