Google Season of Docs 2021 Final Blog - Tutorials

We have been a part of Google Season of Docs 2021 for creating and improving the Wechaty documentation, specifically the Tutorials section. It was an amazing journey of 17 weeks (roughly 4 months) contributing to the Wechaty documentation, during which we got an opportunity to try out and learn a lot about the Wechaty bots. When we initially started contributing to the Docs, we didn’t have any idea about how Wechaty bots can be created that runs on various instant messaging (IM) systems like WhatsApp and Wechat. But gradually we became comfortable with building the bots and started building the documentation.

A brief introduction about us is available below.

Souvik Biswas

I am Souvik Biswas, currently pursuing a B.Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIIT Kalyani in India. I am a freelance technical writer of Codemagic and LogRocket Blog, and a passionate mobile app developer. You can also find some of my articles on Medium, and explore my projects on GitHub.

Shwetal Soni

I am Shwetal Soni, currently pursuing B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from NIT Hamirpur in India. I am interested in UI/UX Design, Frontend web development and recently I’m also exploring the field of Technical Writing. Recently I have only written one technical blog on writing smart contracts on Tezos Blockchain. You can check it out here Medium. You can also find my projects on Github.

Final Video Presentation

Abstract

Our main goal was to improve the Wechaty Tutorials documentation and make it easier to follow for beginner users of Wechaty. We have added step by step guide for building each Wechaty bot from scratch and added interactive CodeSandboxes using which users can try out the bot directly from within the documentation page.

Here’s a brief overview of our tasks:

Refactor the overall Tutorials documentation
Add / improve the step-by-step instructions
Add interactive CodeSandbox
Screenshots / GIF of the bot running on a device
Add various bots building tutorials to Examples
Create a video tutorial

Earlier the tutorial pages lacked a proper structure, so it might not be easy to follow and build a bot for a user to is new to Wechaty. So, we have introduced a structure that is followed on every documentation page, more information about it is below.

Structure of tutorial pages

This is an overview of the final structure for each of the tutorial pages that we have followed so that all the tutorials are consistent and easy to follow for any user.

Introduction: Highlights the goal of the tutorial.
Try out the bot: Contains the CodeSandbox of the bot along with an editable link.
Requirements: List of the required tools in order to follow the tutorial.
Getting started: Covers the installation step of the required tools and how users can try out the bot locally by cloning its GitHub repo.
Building the bot: The main section where we include the step by step guide
Running the bot: Contains commands for running the bot on the user’s system
Bot demonstration: Describes the commands that can be used within the bot along with some screenshots/GIFs if required.
Conclusion & References: Any links that the users can check out for knowing more about a particular concept related to the bot.

Project Goals

We managed to complete all the GSoD tasks as per our initial proposal. In 17 weeks, we have done a total of 40 pull requests which consist of 33 weekly PRs (addition or improvement of documentation pages that we had included in our initial proposal), and 7 miscellaneous PRs (fixes that we have done to some of the pages).

We have also created a video tutorial for building the most basic Wechaty bot, called the Ding Dong Bot, from scratch.

You can take a look at our contributions by going to the respective links present in this section.

You can find all PRs done by us in the links below:

Here’s a complete list of all the contributions that we have done during the GSoD season:

Week	Pull Requests	Technical Writer
1	Add instructions and interactive sandbox for Vorpal #779	Souvik Biswas
1	Update the Vorpal demo screenshot #780	Souvik Biswas
1	Improve Vorpal docs #791	Souvik Biswas
1	Improve and update Vorpal bot steps #882	Souvik Biswas
1	Runnning Locally (Ding Dong bot) #888	Shwetal Soni
2	Getting Started Overview #935	Shwetal Soni
2	Tutorials Overview #934	Shwetal Soni
2	Add installation page under tutorials #905	Souvik Biswas
3	Add Google Cloud Shell tutorial #922	Souvik Biswas
3	Running Ding Dong bot on gitpod #923	Shwetal Soni
5	Update Wechaty Plugin Overview page under Tutorials #957	Souvik Biswas
5	Add tutorial for EventLogger plugin #963	Souvik Biswas
6	Add tutorial for `QR code terminal plugin` #969	Shwetal Soni
6	Add tutorial for Heartbeat plugin #985	Souvik Biswas
7	Using Redux with wechaty overview #989	Shwetal Soni
8	Add Redux: Ducks proposal style docs #1126	Souvik Biswas
9	Add Starter Bot under Examples: Basic #1076	Souvik Biswas
9	Improve the Contact Bot page #1099	Souvik Biswas
9	Updated `ding dong bot` under examples #1103	Shwetal Soni
9	Updated `World's Shortest Chatbot` under examples #1104	Shwetal Soni
10	Created tutorial for room-bot #1131	Shwetal Soni
10	Tutorial for examples/advanced/busy-bot #1134	Shwetal Soni
10	Update the Friend bot page #1138	Souvik Biswas
11	Add tutorial for Media File Bot #1155	Souvik Biswas
12	Tutorial for using vanilla redux with wechaty #1165	Shwetal Soni
12	Add tutorial for Ctrl C Signal Bot #1204	Souvik Biswas
13	Tutorial for Tuling123 Bot #1207	Shwetal Soni
16	Add video demo of ding ding bot #1249	Souvik Biswas
16	Add missing badges to Event Logger plugin page #1250	Souvik Biswas
16	Add missing badges to Heartbeat plugin page #1251	Souvik Biswas
16	Updated links in tutorials overview page and removed empty pages from examples section #1254	Shwetal Soni
16	Added missing badges to QR code terminal plugin #1253	Shwetal Soni
16	Update order of language display #1252	Shwetal Soni

Conclusion

The current version of Wechaty documentation consists of a lot of easy-to-follow tutorials for building Wechaty bots from scratch. Users will find relevant links to all the resources required for building the bot by themselves and can also run some of the bots directly on the documentation page inside the CodeSandboxes that we have included.

Thanks to all the mentors (Huan & Rui) and volunteers (Rohitesh & Simin) for helping us during the documentation period and making our GSoD 2021 season successful.