Alternatives
Products that do what Testified Documentation does
Hello HN, I'd like to share an idea and a library that implements it. As a fan of "Specification by Example" (as described in Gojko Adzic's renowned book), I faced numerous challenges trying to introduce these ideas at work or in hobby projects. Surprisingly, the most challenging part was writing specifications and examples in Gherkin/Cucumber syntax and producing readable living documentation out of them. I believe that the Given... When... Then... format is not the best for user-facing documentation. Personally, I find novel-like narratives, filled with code examples, design…
- 1IW
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca
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2021 · sidepage.co
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Hey HN, I just wanted to share that after five months of intense work and countless caffeine-fueled writing sessions, "Master Software Architecture: A Pragmatic Guide" is now available. Writing this book was a crazy time. I entirely focused on it, and it took exactly 753 hours of writing, editing, and image editing & resizing(!) until the premiere. Yes, the last one (images) was a killer. If you ever think about writing a book, reserve a lot of time for it unless someone else does it for you. As a result, I am handing you the nearly 400-page book. It is a guide that will help you connect all…
2024 · leanpub.com
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2020 · pitsby.com
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2024 · automaticdocs.app
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2019 · github.com
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Hi HN, A lot of the dev teams I have worked with had a lot of issues with their documentation. In fact, some of my easiest clients to get were from clients that had "black box" solutions that devs no longer at the company had created. Personally, writing documentation is like grinding nails on a chalkboard. I have been having a lot of fun with building solutions that can run in a distributed way, not something a dev needs to run themselves. And after a significant amount of testing and building out several different solutions, I finally have a solution that is easy to set up and runs in the…
Dec 2025 · codesummary.io
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I’ve been working on something called Davia — a platform for creating interactive documents. These are “living documents”: each page is self-contained, combining editable content, interactive components, and data. You can read them, edit them, and actually interact with them — more like mini-apps than static docs. Here’s what makes it interesting: The interactive components are pieces of code generated on the fly, so you’re not limited to a fixed set of blocks like in Notion. You can create infinitely flexible functionality right inside a doc. Technically, an interactive page is an ensemble…
Sep 2025 · old.reddit.com
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Hi! I am doing a learning project, attempting to build an imperative language (and interpreter). The end product will be useless for others, I just want to learn and better understand how to build imperative languages. :) If someone else shares this interest and want to give some good hints on good resources I would be grateful. Currently I am looking at an awesome text by Bob Nystrom. All suggestions and tips on resources are most welcome. I am very much a beginner in this, but I find this topic very fascinating. Mail me or post links here! Cheers! You can try a beta version Online at…
2020
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As a solo developer on a sizeable project, I found myself facing the challenge of creating documentation, a task I admittedly do not enjoy. Fortunately, ChatGPT arrived just in time. After experimenting with it, I discovered that it generates high-quality documentation for code files, even better than what I could produce manually. This realization led me to develop Code-Narrator, a client that simplifies the documentation process. Code-Narrator (https://github.com/ingig/code-narrator) utilizes GPT-4 to analyze your code files and automatically generate documentation. The…
2023 · github.com
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For the past few years, I've been frustrated at how we document our products. The code can tell you what you ended up doing, maybe why you ended up doing it (if your team is disciplined about comments/documents), but it can't tell you why you didn't do what you didn't do. Time and time again, I've seen teams try to change something to a better way, only to realize why it was done the "worse" way in the first place. Documenting decisions not taken is just really hard, ADRs help but doing it for everything is just too noisy and time-consuming. What's more, most of the decisions just…
Apr 2026 · github.com
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First tutorial to date. Writing your first C program, includes a link at the bottom with a detailed look at printf() as optional reading. I would love some feedback, as I intend writing up a lot of dev articles for people to learn from : www.xanthu.com/first-c-program
2013
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Hello HN! As a EM, I recently asked for a "good" handoff doc to my engineers who're leaving, but without proper structure, the first draft was pretty crappy. Studying and thinking hard about what readers(i.e., me) might want on header level and what would be a good representation in each section, we came up with a good template for handoff doc. The result was fantastic. I think we all can write better with a proper format and template. That is where I came up with this idea, doc81. Have fun, and let me know what you think!
2025 · github.com
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As a former CIO who managed teams working with millions of lines of legacy code (Visual Basic, Sybase, Oracle Forms, and worse), I feel the pain of maintaining and onboarding developers to legacy systems. Believing that LLM-enabled tools can play a role in solving this, I've built a tool that automatically generates documentation for legacy codebases using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) & Claude Sonnet. At first glance, I think this approach has merit. Some samples are in the README. I welcome your thoughts. The Problem: - Legacy codebases are notoriously difficult to understand and…
2025 · github.com
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Marko here from Codaxy. For over two years, we have been working on CxReports, a low-code tool for creating user-facing PDF documents and reports. We first saw the problem in wealth management, where reports are crucial for the user experience. Software vendors have customers who ask for customized reports with unique content, branding, and visuals. The solution was to build a tool that allows customization for each customer, which even customers themselves can use. Over time, this evolved to be a generic solution that works for various other use cases. CxReports lets you build reports…
2024
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Hi, I'm Marcus. I've spent the last 15 months or so home-coding on a document database, after work, on weekends (every waking hour). My plans for this particular weekend was to implement log-structured writing. It went faster than I thought and the results were faster querying times and fast, append-only writes. I've been working on this for almost a decade and being this close to the finish line feels surreal. This is my seventh iteration I believe. Everytime I realized I had an architecture built on a bad model I walked away, often in fury, depressed over my weak coding abilities but…
2017
- 22GS
I've worked on several projects writing and implementing specifications (particularly CLN): I've found the specs I write are much better when I quote them in the implementation, so I can see what implementers need to know. Also, when specs change in development, it's almost trivial to find where to update the code. This project is a formalization of my various hacky scripts which ensure the requirements are accurately quoted, and give coverage if any are missing. Not a major Opus, but I hope someone else finds it useful!
Jul 2026 · greatspectations.org
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Docs+ is a low-code easy way for developers to share Onboarding documents, API documentation, and much more in an easy way. Create sections and sub-sections, create unlimited pages, and share via a single link to anyone! Docs+ has a huge roadmap ahead and We're happy to hear feedback and make the product better!!
2024 · docsplus.co
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I got the idea of [mindmap.so](http://mindmap.so/) out of my own frustration of managing my personal notes in Notion and Miro in parallel. I have built it 3 months back on top of excalidraw, posted it in Reddit a couple of times, and never looked back (was using it only for personal use). Little did I know that the small and nimble tool that I created has crossed 2000+ users (was so surprised when I saw the dashboard last week). It was all organic and word of mouth . Having 2000+ users trusting a product is no easy feat. That’s when I thought may be I should put some more…
2024 · mindmap.so
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