In this article you will read about

• what’s behind the Tutorial Trophy initiative,
• how to turn your IT knowledge into cash
• and which guidelines you have to follow.  

How do deployment frameworks like Ansible, Terraform or Heat work? Which best practices simplify working with a CI/CD pipeline? Which tips and tricks help when getting started with the microservice architecture? In the Open Telekom Cloud community, users and experts share their IT knowledge about cloud computing, discuss best practices and support each other when it comes to technical challenges.

Detailed tutorials on popular IT topics are particularly valuable for the community. Anyone who brings and shares this knowledge can now also earn some money: Deutsche Telekom is showing its appreciation in hard cash to those whose efforts make it easier for other users, developers and administrators to use the public cloud on a daily basis. In future, authors will receive a fee of 300 euros for writing technical tutorials. In an interview, Nils Magnus, cloud architect at Open Telekom Cloud, explains how this works and what needs to be taken into account.

There is a huge potential in the community waiting to be harnessed. After all, countless experts are active there who are extremely well versed in many cloud topics. We want to help users share their valuable knowledge with one another. This is fully in line with the open source concept underlying our Open Telekom Cloud: It’s based on OpenStack.

Anyone who writes a tutorial really helps others. But of course this kind of tutorial does not write itself. After all, our community members probably have more than enough to do working on their daily tasks. We know that writing a tutorial takes effort. With the Tutorial Trophy initiative, we're creating an additional incentive to share cloud knowledge by rewarding users for their extra effort.

It's very simple. Interested authors send a short description of their tutorial idea. Our editorial team will check the idea. If it is suitable and relevant for the community, then it gets the green light. First, we conclude a fee agreement with the authors. Then the author writes down their idea. Once the text is finished, we review the content. If it is correct and complete, we publish the tutorial in the Open Telekom Cloud Community. As a thank you, the author receives a fee of 300 euros.

No, not necessarily. Essentially, we welcome any topic that makes the everyday life of other users easier. However, we do see topics that are particularly important in the community at the moment. They often deal with topics like automation and infrastructure-as-code. Best practices for development and testing in cloud environments are just as much in focus as the orchestration of containers. Readers are also currently interested in tutorials on IT trends such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and edge computing.

A user-friendly tutorial is first and foremost easy to understand and well structured. Subheadings, for example, give a text a good overview. Screenshots, tables or diagrams make examples clearer. They should include captions that describe exactly what is shown in the image and why it appears here. Because a picture alone rarely speaks for itself. The authors should make sure they write their text using sentences that are as short and active as possible rather than passive.

The ideal text length is between 5,000 and 15,000 characters (including spaces). And we accept any text and file format, but texts in Markdown or reStructuredText make our work easier. We have also compiled the most important tips and best practices for writing tutorials on the Tutorial Trophy page.

A successful structure really helps the reader. The introduction provides the overall context of the tutorial and a good description of the challenges that the author wants to solve with the tutorial, as well as a short summary of the basic procedure. The solution itself should be the main part of the tutorial. Here it is important that the author explains the procedure to the reader step by step. And it should end with a short summary that contains the most important message.