Utilities and VS Code Extensions to Make Developer’s Life Easier
Utilities and VS Code extensions to make developer’s life easier.
Overview
Technical writing is an essential skill. Having good project documentation helps people understand and use your software effectively. Even if you develop the code, after few months potentially the code is indistinguishable from code that someone else has written. If it is an open-source project and you want people to contribute, then you need to let them understand the code in order to help out.
This article explores utilities and VS Code extensions that could help us document our projects.
README
Let’s start with README. For GitHub-hosted projects, different markup formats are supported to write a README document (md, rst, rdoc, org, textile, etc). You can choose a markup language that you are comfortable with to get started.
There are generators available to help us write a better README.
Readme.so
Readme.so is an online editor to help developers make README for their projects.
Using the online editor, I can create a README file with the sections I need.
VSCode Extension: Readme Pattern
Readme Pattern is a VS Code extension that generates README.md files based on The-Documentation-Compendium.
For a curated list of awesome READMEs, check out awesome-readme.
Commit and Changelog
Changelog tells us the changes which were made since the last release. It is helpful to track what has changed in the code and to be able to inform the users of our code. In many projects, creating a changelog is a manual process that is often error-prone and time-consuming. Here is where conventional commits can help.
