Inspiration
It was a stormy evening, circa October, 2021. Frank Hui. second year UBC student and absolute mad-lad, sat keeled over his laptop, tinkering away with a Discord bot that communicated with his Among Us Neon Lamp™. He was frustrated—whenever he needed to refer to the documentation for Discord.py, Frank needed to go through at least one Google search and one webpage to find what he needed. To him, that was unacceptable. Our project aims to solve this problem.
What it does
DocString searches for any Python or JS library straight from the search bar. Simply type "doc" followed by the name of the library you are looking for, and DocString will show you any available JS or Python libraries.
How we built it
DocString was built with JS, using the Chrome omnibox API, as well as the NPM and PyPI package manager APIs.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge our team faced was posting requests for the information of each package and parsing it. Asynchronous JS fetch requests were something none of our teammates had used before, so we all needed to learn how to use it from scratch.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- This extension can show the best 3 search results even if the documentation with the exact search keyword is not found
What we learned
- Developing a browser extension
- Redirecting search from omnibox (I didn’t work on this so I don’t know the details, feel free to add)
- Designing and creating icons
- Working with fetch and API
- Got more familiarized with async javascript
What's next for DocString
- Module/class searching
- More sophisticated animations
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.