KubOS 1.16 Docs, Docs, and More Docs
July 31, 2019
Documentation is often overlooked, with developers focusing on functionality and landing the next big feature. At Kubos, we pride ourselves on our documentation. It’s one of the essential components of accomplishing our mission, and we make sure it is a continual effort, not an afterthought. Over the last two months, we’ve been working hard to realize that goal through a massive documentation overhaul (The Great Docs Reorg of 2019). This overhaul makes our docs clearer, more complete, and easier to navigate. During it, we also created an incredible amount of new documentation that we think will not only help you develop in KubOS, but also understand KubOS in new ways. This release of KubOS is entirely focused on that documentation overhaul.
Mission Development Guide
Among the new documentation, we’ve created a mission development guide that steps through the process you need to go through to develop your flight software using KubOS. This walks through what typically needs to be developed for each mission (such as services and applications), what you should be familiar with before launching your mission (like the recovery process), and a checklist for getting KubOS flight ready before launch. With our system, you don’t have to worry about what you’re getting into or if you forgot something. Just follow that guide and you’ll know everything that’s needed for your mission with KubOS.
KubOS Design Philosophy
Understanding how to use KubOS is an obvious essential part of our documentation, but we felt something else was lacking: What is KubOS, and why did we build it? To answer that we’ve added a Design Philosophy document. It covers the core tenants of KubOS, what we set out to build, why we made some major decisions, and, as it especially interests our industry, how we can address real-time requirements. From that document, we want you to understand not only how we built the current system, but also what we’ll have in mind as we continually iterate and improve KubOS.
Getting Started…Locally
Sometimes, it’s just easier to develop in your own environment. You want to access things easily, or you need to interact with other things that are environment dependant. Whatever your reasoning is, we now support running the KubOS middleware in your local environment (or other environments for that matter). Check out our Getting Started guides to see what all you need to set up.
As Always…
Check out the full release notes in the changelog, and there is a whole lot more there to check out. We’ve worked hard on these docs, but we want to make sure they are useful for our users. If you have any feedback, comments, questions, concerns, general thoughts, we want to hear them! Come talk to us on Slack or submit issues on the Github.
