Technotes for Stand-Alone Technical Documentation

Technotes are a way for Data Management team members to write standalone documents that are native to the web, can be cited in literature, and are easy to write, publish, and update. Some of the possible applications for technotes are:

  • to report the results of a project, such as a data processing or software development experiment,
  • to announce a new technology, serving as a high-level overview complementing software documentation,
  • to propose an architecture, possibly becoming the subject of a request for comment (RFC).

Technotes are simple reStructuredText files in Git repositories that are compiled by Sphinx and served by Read the Docs. The technote platform is documented in a technote: SQR-000.

To create a new technote, follow the instructions for lsst-technote-bootstrap.

We’re working on a live index of technotes, but in the interim a list of available technotes is available on community.lsst.org.