Our team had a major pain point of lacking where to cohesively source documentation. To help solve this, I developed a GUI tool named Cleverdocs, using Gatsby.js, that allowed my team to upload markdown text and search for existing documentation.

This tool uses Gatsby, Ant Design Library, and the Gitlab API for version control. The server uses Node.js and Express, and is powered by PM2.

Through this tool, users could create or edit their own documentation using a built-in markdown editor. There is a form where they can name their new document, decide which folder to place it in (or create a new folder), add tags, and submit their name so the documentation can record who last made an edit to the file.

When a user hits submit, the tool sends the markdown content to our server which passes it through the GitLab API. This API will automatically branch off of the main branch, make a commit with the new documentation, approve the commit, and merge it back into main. Once the main branch is updated, Gitlab then sends a webhook back to our cleverdoc's server that kicks off the process to rebuild the tool. In less than a minute, we have version control on our documentation and the application is online with the latest updated content.

Users can also dynamically search through all of the markdown files for specific text, tags, or user content by using the search bar powered by Gatsby Elastic Search.

Users can also report any bug issues or make documentation requests on a Request page. This connects with the Gitlab Issues API and will generate the issues on the app page and also on the repository, for the team to review and fix.

This project was a lot of fun to work on, although very challenging and took about a year and a half to finally have the MVP up and running. Of course, I had much help from my peers, and the project would have been useless without all of the hard work done by adding and editing documentation that gave the application purpose.