Google Season of Docs 2021 Mid Term Blog: Tutorials

This is the mid term blog for demonstrating all our work that we have done till 8 weeks for creating and improving the Wechaty Tutorials documentation as a part of Google Season of Docs 2021.

Team members

Souvik Biswas (email: sbis1999@gmail.com)

I am Souvik Biswas, currently pursuing a B.Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIIT Kalyani in India. I am a freelance technical writer of Codemagic and LogRocket Blog, and a passionate mobile app developer. You can also find some of my articles on Medium, and explore my projects on GitHub.

Shwetal Soni (email: sonishwetal704@gmail.com)

I am Shwetal Soni, currently pursuing B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from NIT Hamirpur in India. I am interested in UI/UX Design, Frontend web development and I’m also learning blockchain development. Currently I’m working as Tezos India Fellow.

Mid Term Video Presentation

Abstract

• Refactor the overall Tutorials documentation
• Add / improve the step-by-step instructions
• Add interactive CodeSandbox
• Screenshots / GIF of the bot running on a device
• Add various bots building tutorials to Examples
• Create the Cheat sheet

Overall structure of Tutorials

The overall structure of the Tutorials will be as follows:

• Overview Here we can have all the links for each of the pages present in the Tutorials section along with a brief description. This will help the user to easily navigate through the Docs.

• Quick start
  • Overview (containing a brief introduction to each of the sub pages)
  • Running on GitPod
  • Running on Google Cloud Shell
  • Running Locally
• Advanced Usage
  • Usage with Docker
  • Usage with Heroku
  • Using Plugin with wechaty
  • Using Redux with wechaty
  • Using Vorpal with wechaty
• Examples
  • Overview (introduction to the different types of bot included in this examples section)
  • Basic
    • World’s shortest chatbot
    • Contact Bot
    • Ding dong Bot
  • Advanced
    • Demo Bot
    • Busy Bot
    • Media File Bot
    • Room Bot
    • Friend Bot
    • Gist Bot
  • Professional
    • Hot Import Bot
    • Ctrl C Signal Bot
    • Monster Bot
    • Api AI Bot
    • Speech to Text Bot
    • Turing Bot
    • Telegram Roger Bot
    • Blessed Twins Bot
• Cheat sheet
  • Brief description of a bot
  • Code snippet to use it
  • Tech description (in brief)
  • Example - CodeSandbox (maybe included)
  • Screenshots / GIFs

Structure for each tutorial page

A proposed structure of the tutorial documentation is as follows:

• Introduction (also include the goal of the tutorial)
• Try out the bot (CodeSandbox)
• Requirements (tools required to follow the tutorial)

• Getting started

  Quick introduction to the required tools and how to setup their development environment to get started building the bot

• Building the bot

  Step-by-step guide for building the bot, with a CodeSandbox at the end having minimal code and TODO steps where users can try building the bot by themselves directly on the documentation page without installing any tools on their local system

• Running the bot

  Commands for running the bot locally

• Bot demonstration

  Commands that they can use with the bot, and maybe a GIF showing the invocation of some of the commands on WeChat or WhatsApp

• Conclusion
• References

Tasks Completed

Total PR’s

In total we have submitted 25 PR’s out of which 21 are weekly PR’s as per our weekly tasks. Remaining 4 are minor improvements and bug related PR’s.

Shwetal’s PR’s

• Running locally #888: Added tutorial for running ding-dong bot locally
• Overview #935 #934: Added overview for tutorials and getting started
• Gitpod #923: Added tutorial for running ding-dong bot on gitpod
• Plugins #969: Added tutorial for QR code terminal plugin
• Redux #989: Added overview for using redux with wechaty

Souvik’s PR’s

• Vorpal page #779 #780 #791 #882 - Step-by-step guide & CodeSandbox
• Installation page #905 - Tools required for running Wechaty
• Google Cloud Shell page #922 - Improve the guide
• Plugins section #957 #963 #985 - Overview, EventLogger & Heartbeat plugin
• Using Redux with Wechaty #1126 - Guide for Wechaty Redux plugin in Ducks proposal style

Challenges

• Understanding git version control
• Building the first bot using Wechaty
  • Knowledge about NPM projects
  • Using plugins
  • Running bot
  • Interacting with the bot from the connected device
• Understanding how to build CodeSandboxes
• Errors in some bot example codes

Tasks todo

In upcoming weeks, we have to create tutorial for bots under examples/advanced and examples/professional sections. Later we will be preparing a cheet sheet containing some important code snippets and some plugins. At the end we will review our work right from the start and will refactor it wherever it is required.