Mention OTel recipes in "Ecosystem" page

[joaopgrassi]

Desired feature or idea: What would you like to see happen?

I recently published a personal project called OTel Recipes that helps users learn and instrument their apps with OpenTelemetry.

I mentioned this on Slack and @austinlparker suggested it would be cool to have it listed in our website somehow.

[svrnm]

Before we talk about listing, can we explore if and how we integrate it into the OpenTelemetry website directly (if you and the other authors would be open to do that?). This is really cool and I can imagine that this would be a great addition to the website somehow.

[joaopgrassi]

Hum I'm not sure what integrate here would be. I have many ideas for it and have put in a lot of effort in designing and all of that so not sure 😅

[theletterf]

+CC @avillela because of the tutorials' idea.

[svrnm]

Hum I'm not sure what integrate here would be. I have many ideas for it and have put in a lot of effort in designing and all of that so not sure 😅

Your project solves a problem that the official website/docs has and that many people complain about: they look for an easy copy&paste solution for them to get started with OpenTelemetry and what ever project they are working on, and we do not provide that in an easy to consume way (I could give some arguments that we have some of that, but it is indeed burried in the wordy docs). @tedsuo made a similar comment the other day, so I am tagging Ted for visibility:)

We need the wordy docs but eventually we want to have something like that for opentelemetry.io as well. We had discussions around that in the past, we also had ideas to add "examples" to the registry. However, adding that would not only duplicate work, but also take away from your project as a first starter.

So my preferred solution would providing an integration/linking from the website to the recipes, e.g. if someone reads the .NET docs they should find their way to https://otelrecipes.com/recipes?recipe=csharp.aspnetapi.traces and https://otelrecipes.com/recipes?recipe=csharp.console.traces and all other csharp.*

For that otelrecipes does not have to become "fully integrated" into opentelemetry.io (aka living here in this repo etc.), apologies if I indicated that. However, we need to get a lot of logistics addressed, foremost the question how much we want to build a dependency on an "outside" project

[cartermp]

Two things come to mind for me:

1. Like the famed website dotnet pearls there's room for an alternative website of short & sweet snippets of code you can easily copy and paste. The official docs don't need to be the only place to learn specifics stuff with OTel. But they should be the canonical source for information and thus may be longer and more elaborate.

2. There could be a section of the official docs that could be a semi-organized collection of recipes. We would make no attempt to try and elaborate on the recipes; they're intended to be small in nature. Got a nifty use case? Plop it in the recipe book!

I'm not sure which I prefer. But I do believe that for (1), we should definitely link to it from the website here. I think a link in the TOC under the Ecosystem tab would make the most sense for that.

[tedsuo]

Great website, @joaopgrassi!

I feel that this should stay the way it is, and we should link to it in various places where it would be helpful.

For our core documentation, we have the demo apps, I think that's enough as far as examples go. Where I would like to improve our documentation is pulling out the bits that should be copypasta'd so that there is a shorter quickstart guide that is less demo focused. But we can always learn how to improve our demo-based documentation as well.

[chalin]

I agree with @tedsuo, that's a great website @joaopgrassi 🙌 ✨ Y'all are touching on important points. Maybe we can discuss this during Monday's comms meeting? I've added an item to the OTel comms meeting notes.

Immediate thoughts that come to mind:

• Initially linking out to @joaopgrassi's website from OTel.io sounds like a quick and easy solution -- possibly with a disclaimer that the website is not an officially endorsed by OTel maintainers(?).
• Later, if there is a agreement by all parties that the recipes could/should live in this repo (or maybe a "docs-contrib" repo, or under a "recipes" folder of each SIG's repo) and displayed on OTel.io, then what would it take to make this happen? Maybe at some point down the road, you (@joaopgrassi) won't want to manage the maintenance or review of the recipes, and it would make sense to shift this over to be under the OTel org. Just a thought. We can face this if/when it happens.

[joaopgrassi]

@chalin sounds like a great plan to me! It was/is always my idea/intention that, at some point, it becomes a community driven project and it's out of my hands :). I will support it as long as I can/have personal time.