You Need to Document Your Swift Code with DocC

[@seanallen]

Learn more Swift and SwiftUI with my courses at seanallen.teachable.com

[@Sachka]

hey, i'm an ai engineer, i'm looking forward to purchase a vision course where you would showcase how to talk to a 3d asset, i mean just create the 3d sphere of siri a version that follows you around would be enough, btw keep the good work

[@dre5671]

Pro Tip: Ask Claude or GPT to add documentation for your code. It’s usually pretty great right away. Extra pro tip, build your own gpt to use things like important/tip/warning/etc, also back ticks to improve your documentation Didn’t know about the back ticks and the important bubbles till now! Sweet stuff 🙏🏼

[@seanallen]

I'm a big fan of those important bubbles.

[@s81n]

I get some heat sometimes at work for saying "There's no such thing as self-documenting code" but I stand by it. Your code may say what you're doing, but it can't tell why you're doing it and the why is the important part the comments need to cover. That being said I also don't accept uncommented pull requests. Too many people need to touch our code years from now, those comments are important.

[@seanallen]

I agree. The "why" is SO important.

[@austnsauce2543]

Wow I just wrote down "learn ios documentation" on my todo list for my app and this video shows up today. Thanks!

[@seanallen]

👀

[@danuff]

OMG THANK YOU. Never knew what DocC actually did until now. I'll be busy for the next few hours. 🙂

[@seanallen]

Happy to help!

[@darylewalker6862]

Thanks for telling me about the side-panel documentation preview!

[@seanallen]

It's pretty cool

[@KevKevAllen]

I’m new to coding, 👨🏼‍💻 and I’m so glad I found this because I comment the daylights out of my code. I think most of my pages are more comment than code. I just wish there was a tool like this to write User Manuals for the finished app, not just the developer documentation 😭

[@DaveJacobseniOS]

Fantastic walkthrough! I just joined a new company that uses DocC and I've never dealt with it before so this is very timely 👌

[@kennvillegas2014]

This is really interesting. Having a strong background in ObjC\Cocoa I am very used to this Markdown style The ONE thing that I will add is that you can ALSO do this with a foldable block-comments just starting with standard /** */ delimiters

[@fg8520]

please tutorial on airdrop usage in your app, great video as always

[@kris_torres]

Nice vid on DocC. I didn’t know that you can do double ticks for the code links. 🙂 Quick question: Do you recommend also commenting the private structs, methods, et al., or only the ones that are “public”?

[@seanallen]

Based on this question, I assume you're building a library. In that case, these are for two different "users". The public functions or for other developers that use your library, so I'd say that's a must. All the private functions are for you and your internal team. So if you want good documentation for you and your internal team, then I would say yes. If that's not important to you, then don't.

[@RyanPhung725]

Thanks for the video! If you have a lot to document for a function, the inline documentation would get very large. Is there a way to bring this to a new file or hide it some way? Thank you!

[@marceljaeger]

Nice video, DocC is amazing! While you are in the developing process of an app, you might know every function. But after a few weeks break, it`s so hard and annoying to dive in the codebase again, if the project is big and you haven't write a documentation. 😵

[@seanallen]

Exactly :)

[@bryceellis112]

This is was a very impactful video. Thanks for sharing. When you include code snippets (6:18) could you put them at the end of your file? Or does it make most sense to keep it near the function

[@KuisebGecko]

Sean, you once apologised in a video for being 'anal', I for one appreciate your desire to make the code more readable. My code has grown to the extent where I would be spending more time on figuring out what my previous code did rather than spending that time to improve the app. I have taken a stab at DocC once but found myself wasting more time in trying to figure it all out; so thank you VERY MUCH for your videos on summarising these important tools. Like a previous poster said, your videos very often come out at EXACTLY the right time.😎👍

[@Stricken174]

Documentation is a great feature, i'm using from time to time to indicate some spicy stuff with warnings.

[@muncho404]

Thanks for sharing Sean

[@seanallen]

You bet!

[@shashikumar740]

Helpful information 🙌

[@seanallen]

Glad it was helpful!

[@TE_-.-]

Just a quick question, can you collapse these comments in the code base or hide them in some other way? Yes, it's good to see them, but for me it's too confusing when I see so many lines of comments.

[@seanallen]

I'm not sure, but I agree with your sentiment. That's why I changed the color of my comments/documentations in Xcode to be a light grey so it's not prominent. My code is colorful so that's what sticks out while the comments kind of blend into the background. That's my solution for this at least.

[@roygalaasen]

I posted a link to a helpful article, but it seems to have been removed. I will not repost the link, but wanted to add a comment from other posters here that you can make foldable comments with the block comment tag /** */

[@seanallen]

@@roygalaasen Hey Roy, I didn't remove the comment (I never do that). Not sure what happend.

[@roygalaasen]

@@seanallen Maybe it was filtered out automatically by Google or something as all I posted was a link to an article on Medium with no more context other than it was clear by the url where the link would go plus the topic. I was going to add to that link but it was gone. These things happens, by saying the comment was removed, I didn’t mean necessarily that _you_ were the one removing it. It actually happens once in a blue moon, could just be a KZbin bug as well.

[@BehindTheFilm]

So good 🤩 Thanks for sharing!

[@seanallen]

I’m a big fan of this. Happy to share!

[@samtr4439]

Thanks Sean.

[@seanallen]

Any time

[@vamsi3877]

Awesome Sean 👏

[@seanallen]

Glad you enjoyed it

[@arrwoodo]

That was REALLY helpful! ThX!)

[@seanallen]

Glad it helped!

[@ianfrye8988]

Great video my friend!

[@seanallen]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@JasonMitchellAZ]

I've been using doc comments some, but learned some more cool things I didn't know about. Also, you can use multi-line style commenting for doc comments, too - i.e. /** and close with */

[@seanallen]

Thanks for sharing that! So many cool tricks with this.

[@adamgibbons4262]

Why comment your code it makes the file sizes way bigger (using up token count for A.I), its easier to feed an A.I all your code and ask it questions.

[@bored7743]

Kudos for learning this shit. Couldn’t do it. Bored me to death

[@nileshjdarji]

Wow! This is wild. 👍

[@seanallen]

Pretty cool, right?

[@Spacer-l3j]

nice one chief

[@victorriurean]