A tool for building intuitive code documentation

#webdev #productivity #startup #discuss

Hi dev.to,

We're Rishabh, Aashish, Noah, and Moksh, the creators of Codeflow: a tool for building intuitive documentation for code. You can check it out here:

https://codeflow.now.sh/

As current college students, we were all lucky enough to spend our summers interning a variety of places. One common theme we found between our experiences is it was often difficult to start working on a project and typically took many rounds of discussions to understand the flow of the code. Tools like Dropbox Paper and Confluence are great at communicating high-level specifications for engineers, but fail to capture nuances needed for new engineers to continue developing.

Codeflow is our attempt at a solution. It allows engineers to easily build presentation-esque tutorials which focus on stepping through the code logically. We hope it can become a centralized repository of tutorials designed to capture an engineer's thought process and make ramp up more efficient.

Here's an example of a tutorial built using Codeflow:

https://codeflow.now.sh/tutorials/view/RishabhJain96/next.js/tree/b595dd/ck5q9b79d00000vlbn7ichp7p

At this stage, we're hoping for feedback as we try to validate this approach. Any and all thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks,

Rishabh, Aashish, Noah, and Moksh

Top comments (11)

andrzejwp • Jan 23 '20

Hi guys, it's pretty interesting. Is there any documentation I can read to find out how this works?

Aashish Jain • Jan 23 '20

Hi,

We have an FAQ page that we're actively adding to. Codeflow has you authenticate via GitHub, and then displays your code in our editor. You can create tutorials from our editor to share with others. Let me know if you have any more questions!

Best,
Aashish

Jérémie Astor • Jan 23 '20 • Edited

Maybe I missed something, but I have a few question.

Does it support any language?

Would it support some code execution ?

Aashish Jain • Jan 23 '20

Hi,

Codeflow supports any language, as it works via GitHub authentication. You can create tutorials from our editor to share around. Currently we don't support code execution in browser, but it's a feature that's on our radar!

Best,
Aashish

Jérémie Astor • Jan 23 '20

Thanks for your answer.

Theofanis Despoudis • Jan 24 '20

Nice. I noticed though that the code comments are really faded on my MAC

Aashish Jain • Jan 28 '20

In Codeflow you can intentionally choose to highlight certain parts of the code. Looks like this tutorial just wanted to highlight those aspects. Do you think non-highlighted lines are too faded?