Creating Awesome Documentation With Yard

This semester I have been taking a computer architecture class. Overall, it's been pretty fun because I was given three projects and allowed to do them in the language of my choice. I chose Ruby. I'm pretty proud of these projects, so I decided to post them all to Github. If you are interested in the actual code, you can find it here. While I was doing this, I realized I needed to up my average documentation game. I needed the grader, who didn't know Ruby, to be able to easily understand what I was doing and why I was doing it. For the first two projects, I just wrote up documentation in a relatively reasonable way, and they were able to read through the code comments to see how it worked.

That's when I found YARD. YARD uses markup (I used markdown) and tags to create delightful HTML docs. What were just comments in my code turned into this, with almost no extra effort. I'd heard of it before, but I hadn't had a project that was worth massive documentation. YARD made the documentation a delight. You create the necessary documentation by using markdown, so your README functions as the homepage for your docs. Then, within each class, you use tags to explain params, return values, and add notes and examples. Here is an example from my MIPSDisassembler project:

class MipsDisassembler
  # Creates a new instance of MipsDisassembler
  # @param array_of_instructions [Array] the array of string instructions
  # @param starting_address [String] starting address for instructions, should be a string hexadecimal value
  # @param is_hex [Boolean] true if array of instructions is in hex, false if in binary
  # @note Each object in array_of_instructions should be a string representation of either binary or hexadecimal number
  # @return [MipsDisassembler] a new MipsDisassembler object
  # @example Create an object
  #    mips = MipsDisassembler.new(["0x022DA822", "0x8EF30018", "0x12A70004"], "7A060", true)
  def initialize(array_of_instructions, starting_address, is_hex)
    @instructions = array_of_instructions
    @starting_address = starting_address
    @is_hex = is_hex
  end

  # Takes binary/hex instructions and starting address and return an array of MIPs instructions.
  # @note Determines if r-format or i-format and parses accordingly.
  # @return [Array] an array of MIPs instructions, human-readable
  # @example Disassemble instructions
  #    mips.disassemble => ["7A060 sub $21 $17 $13", "7a064 lw $19, 24 ($23)", "7a068 beq $7, $21, address 0x7a07c"]
  def disassemble
    disassemble_instructions(@instructions, @starting_address, @is_hex)
  end

  # write MIPs instructions to file
  # @note File "mips_results.txt" will be created in same directory as code
  # @return [void]
  def output_to_file
    File.open("mips_results.txt", "w") do |f|
      in_file = ""
      disassemble.each { |instruction| in_file << instruction + "\n" }
      f.write(in_file)
    end
  end
 end

You can see the result of this code here as well as the image below. The result is easy to navigate documentation that you can share with anyone. It also gives the ability to see the source code of each method inline, so you don't have to go far to see the actual code behind public methods that you would want to use. I know I'm a bit of a dork, but I seriously loved putting this documentation together and I'm hoping it made my code just a bit more accessible.