Documenting the manual: how curiosity and robotic arms led to a career in open source
Documenting the manual: how curiosity and robotic arms led to a career in open source
Publish Date: 2026-06-22 14:33:00
Source Domain: opensource.googleblog.com
When you think of “innovation” in open source, your mind probably jumps to the latest AI model or a revolutionary new framework. You might not immediately think of manual pages. Even Alejandro “Alex” Colomar, who spends his days maintaining Linux Kernel documentation, jokingly admits that some might find the work “boring” because it focuses on fixing existing issues and documenting new features rather than flashy inventions.
But as any developer knows, the most powerful code is only as good as the documentation behind it. At Google, we believe that investing in the success of projects we don’t own is a core part of being a good open source citizen. That is why we are proud to sponsor Alejandro’s work on the Linux Kernel man-pages project—supporting the critical infrastructure that many of our own systems rely on every day.
Documentation is the gift you give to your future self and your whole community.
The precision of a robot
Alejandro’s journey into the world of essential documentation started at university. He was working with robotic arms that used a proprietary scripting language. Wanting more control, he decided to write a C library to communicate with the robots over the network by sniffing packets with Wireshark. It worked, but it was slow—he had to wait seconds between commands to ensure the robot had finished moving.
To make the movements smooth, he needed to understand the messages the robot was sending back in real-time. This required high-precision timing. He found SO_TIMESTAMP, which provided microsecond precision, but he noticed a macro called SO_TIMESTAMPNS in the header files that promised nanosecond resolution. The problem? It wasn’t documented in the manual page.
The first patch
After figuring out how to use the undocumented feature by looking at the kernel source code, Alejandro decided to ensure the next person wouldn’t have to struggle. He cloned the man-pages repository, wrote a new…
