Those two major new features would turn out to be an inflection point in DevDocs’s user base. Instead of being limited to only the most recent version of a documentation, DevDocs now started supporting multiple versions for each project and library. All of these files would be stored in the browser, thanks to a clever use of a new technology called IndexedDB.Īnd in early 2016, Thibaut added support for versioning. Suddenly, anyone could download entire sets of documentation for access offline. Then, in 2015, Thibaut made DevDocs fully-functional offline. Over the next two years, Thibaut added many improvements such as new documentation, keyboard shortcuts, better search, mobile support, and the ability to switch to a dark theme for night-time viewing. Thibaut wrote dozens of scraping scripts to go out and automatically download documentation from different projects, each carefully-tuned to create a consistent reading experience and generate good search results. The DevDocs project has since gone on to accumulate more than 17,000 GitHub stars, along with 66 contributors (though Thibaut is still by far its most prolific contributor). But on October 24, 2013, he open-sourced it. Then, after a few months of development, Thibaut launched DevDocs on June 18, 2013, as a free web app.Īt first, Thibaut kept DevDocs closed source. Originally, DevDocs was just an ordinary documentation folder on his hard drive, for his own personal use - the kind that many developers had on hand for reference. At the time, he just wanted a better way to quickly access the Mozilla Developer Network documentation. Thibaut created DevDocs exactly 5 years ago today, on March 26, 2013. Thibaut is a French developer who now works as a senior development lead at Shopify in Ottawa, Canada. Then a couple months ago, Thibaut approached me about the possibility of donating the DevDocs project to the freeCodeCamp community, so that we could continue to grow the project beyond what he is able to do as a lone maintainer.Īnd today - exactly 5 years after Thibaut created DevDocs - I’m excited to announce that DevDocs is now officially part of the freeCodeCamp community! A brief history of DevDocs We exchanged ideas for how to make tools that were more accessible to developers in parts of the world without reliable high-speed internet connections. He was helpful in explaining how DevDocs worked and his reasoning behind some of his design decisions. I reached out to DevDocs creator Thibaut Courouble for advice. We were going to create a DevDocs-like interface for exploring programming concepts. So when it came time to design the freeCodeCamp Guide last summer, I already had a clear template in mind. A screenshot of DevDocs.io and its intuitive API documentation browsing interface Every API is laid out in the same clear hierarchy. The speed and simplicity of DevDocs is a real a breath of fresh air. The simple, no-nonsense landing page of DevDocs - with browsable API documentation along the left-hand side I’ve been using DevDocs since before freeCodeCamp even existed, and have sung its praises over the years. DevDocs is an open source web app that combines documentation for lots of developer tools into a single searchable interface.
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