During the 2-day "Hacks With Friends" event at the University of Michigan, our team collaborated to develop the "Documentation Makeover Bot," a tool designed to streamline and enhance technical documentation. Using the U-M Maizey platform, this innovative bot reviews existing technical documents on a given topic from a source library, and consolidates them into a single, well-formatted and accessible document. This newly created document is ready for review by a subject matter expert. Once approved, the document is loaded to an updated documentation library.
To get a working bot in the allotted time, we chose the tools we were most proficient with, specifically PowerShell and Python scripts, to interact with the Maizey and Google Documents API interfaces. These technologies enabled our bot to efficiently generate new documents and seamlessly upload them into a Google Documents library. The result is a user-friendly, organized system that reduces redundancy and improves the clarity and accessibility of technical documentation.
A Documentation Makeover Bot like ours can provide significant value to teams and departments of the university by addressing the common challenge of maintaining high-quality, up-to-date documentation. It optimizes the process of document consolidation and formatting, and would make it easier for staff and faculty to produce and manage essential technical documents efficiently.