| Authors: | Dr. Ana Nelson |
|---|---|
| Time: | 17:20 |
| Session: | http://docs.writethedocs.org/en/2013/conference/talks.html#ana-nelson |
| Link: | @ananelson / http://dexy.it/ado |
Nelson is a former economist, and now a software developer, and became interested in document automation while working on her economics thesis. Dexy is the tool she wrote to support automating documentation.
There are lots of tools for authoring code and for authoring prose, but the tools for automating and tying them together haven’t kept up. There are approaches for putting your prose in code, or code in prose, but they’re generally inflexible and rigid. But what if you have tools that let you keep things independent from one another, and then bring them together?
Before we talk about the tool, what about data? It’s a third sort of information, in addition to prose and code. If documentation lives in the space between prose and code, analysis lives between code and data, and reporting lives between prose and data.
There are inputs that cost money – code, prose, and data – and there are outputs that add value: documentation, reporting, and analysis.
Dexy is a tool for automating the integration of code, prose, and data. In other words, it’s a tool for automating reporting, analysis, and documentation.