Hey everyone! For three months in a row, I promised each time that it would be the final Symbol documentation report... but this time I really think it is the last one.
Symbol documentation work is officially complete.
(The user guide for the product planned for release is currently on hold, but ethically and for my own conscience, I will add it later.)
So here is the final report on Symbol documentation, the beginning of a new series of reports on NEM documentation, and... a return to game-development mode.
Summary of Work Done
Content Writing I spent the entire month going through the comments Jaguar left when he thoroughly reviewed the new Symbol documentation site.
Some comments pointed out technical issues (that was my fault!), while many focused on writing style or suggestions for improvement. There were quite a lot of them.
The review took longer than expected, but as a result the quality of the documentation improved significantly, and it is finally ready to be published as the official Symbol documentation.
For example, on the Developer Manual landing page, tutorials are now categorized by difficulty, making it easier for beginners to find the right starting point.
Review Developer Pages (task-docs-dev) Zero has started work on the new NEM documentation site, and I am reviewing the materials as they come in. You can check the work currently in progress here.
The site has the same structure as the new Symbol documentation, consisting of a user manual, developer manual, and textbooks that supplement them. The textbooks are already complete, and the work has now moved on to creating tutorials.
Since Symbol SDK supports both the Symbol and NEM blockchains, most NEM tutorials are very similar to the Symbol ones, so I expect the work to move quickly. 🤞🏻
DARUMA STUDIO In May I somehow managed to make time and spend two full days working on the XYM City game design document.
Now that the Symbol documentation review is finally over, I hope that number will increase significantly over the next few months... 💃🏻
Site Structure ⚙️ Some of Jaguar’s review comments required major changes to the infrastructure underlying the site.
Refactoring something that was supposed to be finished is a special kind of pain. But pain is temporary, while Git remains forever. I kept telling myself that as I continued the work. The tutorial system now includes:
- Complexity metadata tags that label each tutorial and automatically generate a sorted table on the developer manual landing page.
- Named code snippets instead of line-number-based references, allowing source code to evolve without constantly updating snippet ranges.
- Variable names in tutorial text now automatically adapt to the selected programming language. Method and class names already worked this way, but variables did not.
Learning 🤖 Hatchet encourages us to master modern AI-assisted workflows.
I had already been using ChatGPT heavily to polish my writing (sorry! English is not my native language), but this month I went one step further and introduced Codex into VS Code.
During the site refactoring work, it proved very useful. Having an assistant that can understand the structure of the entire documentation repository is clearly an advantage.
That said, I still keep it under fairly strict control. I may be a little paranoid, but I do not intend to let it commit anything without my confirmation.
Here is the relative time allocation for each task this month:
Documentation Progress
Symbol Symbol documentation is officially complete. The only remaining work is preparing the site so it can be published at the final URL.
Of course, documentation is never completely finished. As new products and features are developed, new guides will continue to be added.
This will be the last progress-chart post... please look at this beautiful 100% bar. 🥲
NEM Starting next time, I will report on NEM documentation instead. I decided to simplify this section. It will be easier for readers to follow, and for me... because creating the chart above took much longer than expected 😅
The status is simple to see. Of the planned NEM documentation tasks, 25% are already complete or in progress.
Next Plans
Continue reviewing Zero’s work on NEM documentation
It has finally paid off. I can finally return to designing XYM City
I have been away from my child-like XYM City for too long and I miss it!
Even excluding character settings, mission design, and scripts, would you believe the game design document is already nearly 40 pages long?
I will report on that work from now on too, while being careful not to spoil too much. 🙂
Thank you for reading this far. See you next month!
Xavi (Japanese translation by Radio)