Software documentation is important because it helps developers and other stakeholders understand code. However, it can be time-consuming and expensive to produce. Junior engineers and those who are new to a codebase rely on documentation to get by. It saves senior developers time in the future when explaining their code to others. Documentation has a direct influence on user adoption for public-facing and open-source projects.
Founded in 2021 by two software engineers, Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee, Mintlify is a startup offering software to automate software documentation chores. The company’s technology scans code and generates documentation to explain it. With automated, clean, and comprehensive documentation, it saves time and improves the codebase. The company’s technology scans code and generates documentation to explain it, utilizing natural language processing and web scraping capabilities. It’s also available as a Visual Studio Code extension and IntelliJ plugin.
Mintlify’s goal is to use automation to overcome the issues of generating documentation. It is available as a free tool for individual developers. It helps automate job management and development workflows by integrating with platforms such as Slack, Dropbox, and GitHub. Mintlify not only generates documentation but also checks for “stale” documentation and monitors how users interact with it to enhance readability. It can automatically configure alerts to be notified when documentation requires maintenance. It can also tag documentation ownership to those responsible for the code.
The New York-based firm has secured $2.8 million in a seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from TwentyTwo Ventures and co-founder Quinn Slack. Mintlify will use these funds for product development and increasing its core three-person staff by the end of the year, according to CEO Han Wang.
References:
- https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/30/mintlify-taps-ai-to-automatically-generate-documentation-from-code/
- https://www.techtimes.com/articles/276118/20220531/mintlify-uses-artificial-intelligence-to-address-software-documentation-challenges-raises-2-8-million.htm
- https://www.mintlify.com/writer
- https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mintlify
Consultant Intern: Currently in her third year of B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Goa. She is an ML enthusiast and has a keen interest in Data Science. She is a very good learner and tries to be well versed with the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence.
