@abhishalya

Halfway through MLH Fellowship

The last week has been the most productive for me in terms of getting contributions there on the upstream repositories. I've created a couple of PRs #1454 and #1456 which adds some of the most requested features in Documenter.jl project.

The Documenter.jl project

Documenter is a very interesting project. For some reason before actually looking at the code, I expected that a static site generator like Documenter should have a bunch of HTML templates which it would use to then generate HTML files for the site. But, actually Documenter just uses Julia to write the HTML part as well. This was actually quite interesting because a site would have loads of HTML and writing every part of it would just be lengthy, but it is not! You can easily write a very good site just with a few Julia lines. You can check how Documenter does it, and I really like how cleanly you can write a HTML generator or writer.

Apart from that, Documenter does use JavaScript in places where you need them. For example, the switching between the themes is based on JavaScript but it does provide a good user experience with just few lines of code and doesn't affect the performance of the site since there are not any dependencies apart from jQuery which is also usually just cached in the browser.

Looking forward for more contributions

So, overall it has been a really productive week because since the start of the MLH program I haven't been able to focus on the project much because there is a lot of stuff you can do with them and before you actually start contributing to any issue you need to play around a bit to know exactly where the changes are to be made.

I'm still in the process of reviewing the changes I want to introduce in those PRs. There are some things which requires changes to the internal escaping of the string content in Documenter. I'm discussing these issues with the maintainer and soon you should be able to see the copy to clipboard button there on your documentation site. Also, with small changes to the theme switching mechanism your documentation will respect the user's color preference and will auto-switch to the dark or the light mode.

I'm thinking of writing blogs every Monday from now on. So I really hope this helps me improve my writing skills and at the same time, share some of my knowledge with the community.

Thanks for reading! 😃