Docs vs Tooling

External documentation is great in supporting developers using our code, but it’s not always enough and doesn't provide an immediate guidance to the developers using the code. Enter Tooling.

Tooling refers to the development tools/processes that make our code more maintainable and useable for others.

In this talk, I'd elaborate on docs, tooling, and how/why frontend developers can integrate both docs and tooling to enable other developers and themselves to effectively use their code.

Transcript

1. Docs vs Tooling — How You can Support Developers to Effectively Use Your Code By Victor Ikechukwu
2. I am Victor Ikechukwu. I code and write about code. 2 Hell0! 👋 www.iamvictor.tech @Victor_codejs
3. Table of contents ✗ What is Documentation? ✗ Why you need Documentation, and its benefits ✗ What is Tooling? ✗ Examples of Tooling and their benefits ✗ How you can combine both Documentation and Tooling to better support the developers that’ll use your code 3
4. WHAT IS DOCUMENTATION? 11
5. Documentation refers to all the materials that explains how our code works and how it should be used. 5
6. How is documentation helpful? 11
7. 7 It helps others to use your code
8. 8 It enable others to help out
9. Benefits of good documentation to developers ✗ Improved developer experience (DevX) 9
10. Benefits of good documentation to developers ✗ Improved developer experience (DevX) ✗ Help you achieve your growth goals 10
11. IF Documentation is so good, what are we still doing here? 11
12. Tooling 11
13. Tooling refers to all development tools/processes that make our code more maintainable and useable for others. 13
14. 14 Examples of Tooling
15. 15 Type-safe Code (Type-safety)
16. 16 Using Type-safe code (Typescript) :)
17. 17 Using Type-safe code (Typescript) :)
18. 18 Using Type-safe code (Typescript) :)
19. Type unsafe (normal JavaScript) code won’t do this 19
20. 20 Using type unsafe code (JavaScript) :(
21. 21 Using type unsafe code (JavaScript) :(
22. 22 Using type unsafe code (JavaScript) :(
23. 23 Documentation Generators
24. Examples of Documentation generators ✗ JSDoc ✗ Python DocStrings ✗ Javadoc 24
25. JSDoc is a documentation generator for Javascript 25
26. 26 Syntax:
27. 27 Using JSDoc :)
28. 28 Using JSDoc :)
29. 29 Not using JSDoc :(
30. 30 Not using JSDoc :(
31. Benefit of tooling 31 Improved Developer Experience
32. When should you use these tooling? 32
33. Should you prefer one over the other? (documentation or tooling) 33
34. NO! 34
35. Key takeaway 35 As developers, managers, open-source maintainers we owe it to ourselves, to the community and to the developers who would use our code to incorporate documentation, best code practices and any other tools/process that will support them to use our code — That’s open source to me
36. Thank YOU! You can find me at: @Victor_codejs 36 Link to slides — https://bit.ly/docs-vs-tooling