OVERVIEW
OpenSquiggly is a documentation hub builder, project source file curator, and code search platform focused on the needs of software development teams, bringing together your documentation and source code from all of your projects across the enterprise into a single, unified, interactive knowledge base.
It works by ingesting source files and Markdown documentation from GitHub and other Git repositories, allowing you to organize, search, document, take notes, share, and bookmark files so that developers can work efficiently on their tasks and coordinate their work with remote developers on the team.
You can think of it like a virtual, distributed wiki. In a traditional wiki, users log into the system to author content within the system itself, which makes the content centralized, and essentially "held hostage" by the wiki.
OpenSquiggly is different. The end result is similar - an interactive knowledge base of content - but the way the knowledge base is constructed is different. Content can be written as Markdown files and stored in Git repositories alongside the project source code, where the documentation can be maintained and versioned in the same place where the source code lives. This helps to prevent the documentation from becoming out of sync with the code, a common problem with technical documentation. Rather than living in a single, centralized location, documentation can be distributed out to the individual teams for them to maintain as they'd like.
OpenSquiggly then assembles these disparate documentation sources into a single, unified environment that the whole company can use.
TYPES OF DOCUMENTATION SYSTEMS FOR DEVELOPERS
There are two main ways that software development teams can document their systems. The first is to use an interactive authoring environment, such as a corporate wiki. This has been more-or-less the standard way of doing things over the last couple of decades.
Over the last few years, a new way of writing documentation has emerged, which the industry has come to call docs-as-code. In a docs-as-code approach, documentation is written in text files, usually Markdown, and then compiled into a web site using a static site generator. Open source static site generators such as Sphynx, MkDocs, Hugo, and many other such tools have come to serve this purpose.
Neither approach is fully satisfactory to a modern, distributed software development team.
Corporate wikis, while convenient, require developers to use a different workflow than their ordinary daily development cycle. Developers want to write documentation using their favorite text editor, create a pull request on GitHub, and push the final, approved changes to the master branch, the same familiar lifecycle by which they make source code changes.
Static site generators, on the other hand, while more aligned with the developer workflow, are difficult to configure, usually require the help of the DevOps team to maintain the CI/CD process, and produce only static, non-interactive web pages. It can also be difficult to merge the results of many projects across the organization into a single, cohesive site.
OpenSquiggly essentially provides the best of both worlds of these two approaches. It allows each team to write their documentation in their own Git repositories, and OpenSquiggly takes care of all the details of merging multiple projects together into a unified portal.
With OpenSquiggly, you can get a docs-as-code driven, interactive documentation hub up and running in minutes.