Improving developer.md

[yeelan0319]

I think we could improve developer.md to better serve its purpose.

To give a little bit context of the document, it is under docs/ and there are 2 direct links: one from README.md at index level and another from authoring-components.md says "If you are brand new to the project, we recommend starting with our general developer documentation."

As it states, it is a quick overview for history and scope of the project, component architecture and what tools we use to build, test, manage the system. But given its position and content, I do have this question in mind:

Who is our target reader for this doc?
It is the second link right after quickstart, which kind of states its importance among all the docs. But my question is who is a typical reader of the doc? The word developer could mean in this case users of mdc-web or contributors of mdc-web. But its content seems not very helpful for users, nor clear enough for developers to be involved in the project.

Maybe there are a few ways we can improve it:

• The overview part is pretty useful to know the scope of the project, so maybe we could merge developer.md with docs/README.md instead of hiding it under a separate doc.
• If we are targeting all developers and let them have a overview of the project, we could split the structure of this doc into overview - If you are mdc-user - If you want use mdc with frameworks - If you want to contribute and make it to be the directory of useful resource links.
• If it is targeting specific group of the above user, the content could also be more concentrated toward what they need.

This is not something urgent that we need to do but I think it will be overall helpful to make our documentation more helpful to all developers. Let me know your thoughts, thanks!

[traviskaufman]

Agreed with the points above. Let's put the overview section into docs/README.md, and take the rest of the sections and simply link to their relevant docs in a table of contents within docs/README.md.

[moog16]

We don't have developer.md readme. Closing.