I’m working on a tool that allows developers to record and playback interactive, guided walkthroughs of a codebase, directly from their editor. It’s called CodeTour, and it’s currently available as a VS Code extension: https://aka.ms/codetour.

I built it because I frequently find myself looking to onboard (or “reboard”) to a project, and not knowing exactly where to start. After speaking to a bunch of other developers, I didn’t seem to be alone, so it felt like this problem was deserving of some attention.

While documentation can help mitigate this problem, I wanted to explore ways that the codebase itself could become more explainable, without requiring unnecessary context switches. Almost like if every repo had a table of contents. To make it easier to produce these “code tours” I built a tour recorder, that tries to be as simple, and dare I say, fun to use as possible.

I’ve since found that this experience has value in a number of other use cases (e.g. simplifying PR reviews, doing feature hand offs, facilitating team brown bags, etc.), and I’m excited to keep getting feedback from folks as they try it out. It’s also fully OSS, so I’d love any and all contributions: https://github.com/vsls-contrib/codetour.