Why another yet docs framework?

Why we built another yet docs framework from scratch

The journey to make a decision about creating our own docs framework ended with a deep research and getting a knowledge about a market and trying to predict trends and our strong beliefs what the future of building software would be.

The term "build vs. buy" is still alive and we were considering this much - the result was: „we need build, definitely“.

Scale

The first thing we need much is a scaling software. Many Open Source docs frameworks are great but was not designed to built another software based on that, like a next lego brick in a whole ecosystem - and for a most use cases it's fine, but unfortunately not for us.

Docs frameworks solves many problems like rendering content, a rich component base or pluggable architecture. We need such as piece of software in LiveSession ecosystem to make our product more powerful.

For example we're on the road to the build of our next generation content team where things created by engineering team are fundamentals (this blog for example).

Lack of features

Another scaling issue we have is a lack of features we need to have right now or in the near future. We're building our next generation Developer Platform where our needs are very high.

For example we have a REST, GraphQL or Webhooks API and we need to build API reference docs for that. We also have needs in generating SDKs or references for many programming langugages.

Currently, there's no such docs framework that covers all of this. Not to mention that it should be inside one ecosystem to have a software more consistent.

Writing experience

We're also not satisfied with a writing experience. We see that this process could look better from our perspective. Especially if we're building a docs for a code, code samples and other stuff that comes from different sources and is often materialized in different ways. Engines like MDX or Markdoc are good but not enough. Thats why we're building our own engine - Xwrite.

KISS

Starting building docs should be as much easy as possible, without figthing with deeply technical details at a first glance. We believe in framework agnostic approach focused on building what's most matter - the content.

Of course, it doesn't mean that software should be closed, on the contrary, open as possible but with a strong User Experience. At LiveSession we are obsessed with this.

For example to start building a docs I'd like to install software, choose theme/integrations and start writing a content without touching a code if it's not needed. Having a desktop/web app would be awesome (coming soon).

Price

On the market exists free(open) and paid(most not true open) software for making docs. From the extendability perspective, open source were winning but in many cases entry level and Developer Experience was much poor than paid.

On the other hand paid solutions in our opinion were too expensive, much of them targets to VC backed companies and also we were worry about our scaling needs and the more, code was not available or not truly available.

Keep Open Source strong

It doesn't matter what software we build as engineers, Open Source is invaluable. We believe that docs frameworks should be true Open Source and driven by community. Our needs are very high and it can be helpful for others because we can cover many use cases. But if not, it's still true open software where everyone can contribute and redistribute.

Trends

There is no surprise AI things are trendy right now, so docs in the area of AI are too. We'd like to build a good ground up for AI tools and design a new communication between a content and AI (coming soon).

Even the previously mentioned Xwrite has a strong capabilities to become a strong building block used by AI or not mentioned yet APIToolchain.

This is the beginning

We released xyd-0.1.0-alpha where we spent few months of work. It's still limited but growing quickly.

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