Cheat sheet with style
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User experience should be at the center of your concern when developing your application. Whatever you’re developing a programming library, framework, or even a whole new language. The experience of the final user will be the key to success.
In the world of developers, we tend to see ourselves as “code blooded”. And very often, we see our product as easy to use. Spoiler, they are not. They need documentation. But as coders, why should we bother with writing documentation ? Writing text that’s not code ? What a waste of my precious time.
When documentation are written, they can be very sparse, or on the opposite, extremely long and verbose. Let’s refocus on the final user experience. Currently, most of library/framework github have a very long readme. It explaining nearly all parts of the software. Sometimes, after being too big, it’s split into some wiki pages and a small readme. But in the first case, we have to scroll to search the small snippets we want, and on the second case, we have to search the good page, then to search this snippets.
We saw an opportunity here. This gap could be filled with cheat sheet. Providing all interesting snippets or concepts in one place. We want them to be printable, we want to be able to draw and add note on them. That way, they could land on our desktop to be always available when you need them, or serve as a support for students. You could even give cheat sheet at conference, as a marketing product. But a product that is useful to people. Not like a pen with your logo on it.
We wanted to give developers a tool to write cheat sheet as a part of they workflow. And for that, we’ve created “Cheaty”.
Cheaty is a library, and a cli to generate sheet. It read YAML and generate print ready HTML files. Then you can print (to paper of pdf) and start sharing them. Cheaty is designed to be part of each flow. You can generate the sheet as you type to have live preview. Or you can add it to your CI/CD flow to automatically generate sheet with each release. It’s up to you. And last but not least, it fully free, open source, and MIT licensed !
We think cheaty can help developers to distribute knowledge on their creation. But to achieve this vision, we need you. We need to know how to evolve cheaty. And for that, we want to know how you use it. So, please, don’t hesitate to open issue and request feature of our GitHub ! That would be the greatest way to contribute to the project.
