Great Expectations’ API documentation is more complete after our first-ever docstring party—the rare party that leaves the premises looking better than they did before.
What exactly is a docstring party? At GX, it’s where the whole engineering team takes a day to focus on improving the public API docstrings, complete with a leaderboard and prizes. The result is concerted API documentation improvements with a side of teambuilding.
“Having well-documented public APIs is something that is really key for serving our community well, so we are always thinking about how we can make improvements,” said Don Heppner, GX’s director of engineering. “The docstring party was an idea that everyone got on board with right away.
“It was great to have all of engineering working on the same thing at the same time—people who don’t often directly collaborate came together to make a big improvement to our docs over a short period of time.”
Even people who aren’t usually developers got in on the docstrings, including Don (“it was really exciting to cancel some meetings to code instead”), and the product team, who contributed a docstring as a group after a tutorial.
That tutorial and most of the heavy lifting for organizing the docstring party was helmed by Anthony Burdi, a senior software engineer who was also responsible for the API documentation’s recent move to Sphinx.
“There was so much support from the team for this effort,” Anthony said. “It was really humbling to see everyone embrace this effort so fully.”
By the numbers, the docstring party had:
81 PRs submitted and merged
245 docstrings updated or written
28 participants
Though the main party is over, the docstring work continues. “You can expect to keep seeing more,” Anthony said. “We are working hard to make our API documentation some of the best out there.”
You can view GX’s API documentation here.
