Roy – Component Explainer

Inspiration

Have you ever imported a bunch of seemingly understandable components only to soon realize that it's harder than you thought to untangle the web of code and you are now unsure of how the various components work together? We've all been there, and that's why we were inspired to create a solution that not only benefits us but also helps developers everywhere streamline their workflow and boost productivity. Enter "Roy," your new companion for understanding and documenting software architecture with ease.

As software developers ourselves, we've often encountered the challenge of figuring out how different components fit together and what purpose each one serves. Its questions like these that can slow down development and lead to frustration.

What it does

Roy is here to make these situations a thing of the past. Roy uses the power of Chat-GPT to generate human-readable component descriptions for your Compass components. By analyzing your codebase and its architecture, Roy generates clear, concise, and insightful documentation, making it easy to understand the various components and their relationships within your project. It's like having a personal guide to your code, always ready to provide you with valuable insights.

How we built it and challenges we ran into

Our journey to create Roy wasn't without its hurdles. Initially, we were concerned that developing a tool like Roy might be complex and time-consuming, especially with using the new ChatGPT API which was new to everyone on the team. However, thanks to the article written on how to use the ChatGPT API from Atlassian, we were able to implement it easily. Most of our issues actually came from the Forge limitations that we encountered but we were able to find ways around them pretty easily.

Accomplishments that we're proud of and what we learned

One of our most notable accomplishments in developing Roy was our seamless adoption of the Svelte framework. Despite initial concerns, we found Svelte to be a powerful and flexible tool that we were able to master with ease, resulting in a responsive and efficient frontend for our application.

What's next for Roy – Component Explainer

Now that Compass has officially been released we hope to see Roy in the marketplace at some point. We also would like to work on making Roy a bit more customizable so that users can determine the format and what type of content is included in their description, making Roy even more useful.