Better Documentation

As part of the TuringTrader beta release, we have also updated the documentation: we have entirely rewritten the quick start guide and overhauled the look & feel of the API documentation.

Let’s face it: among developers, documentation tends to be a bit of an afterthought. It is an issue of unmatched bandwidth: ideas flow in at a much higher rate than we can code, and that again happens at a much faster rate than we can document.

We want developers to adopt TuringTrader widely, and we want to provide the best possible experience for these developers. Documentation is an essential piece to this puzzle, which is why we decided to bite the bullet and spend some time on it.

Consequently, we spent some time on completely rewriting the quick start guide. The QSG now includes a Five Cent Tour, to provide a quick overview of working with TuringTrader. It then goes into instructional demos, aimed at familiarizing developers with the most important APIs. We show the APIs in more detail, with our showcase algorithms, featuring some real-life algorithms. And finally, we have some articles on other pressing topics, including data setup. We hope this will help you hit the ground running.

For the API documentation, we did a major overhaul, too. We switched tools from Sandcastle to DocFX, which results in a new and modernized look. One unfortunate side-effect of this switch is that we no longer have a Windows help file. Instead, our documentation is online only. On the positive side, we can now write our documentation in Markdown, which should significantly boost our productivity, and help us update our documentation more often.

Cheers to that!