Technical Documentation: Steam-Layer

It is sometimes difficult to write complete documentation while a system is still under construction. For taking work notes and formulating new ideas while working, Ichthyostega frequently uses the TiddlyWiki — which is a nifty JavaScript wiki embedded within a single HTML page; as such it lives right within the source tree, where it can be worked on alongside with the code. Notes and sketches for the planning often evolve into detailed descriptions, complete with test data and UML diagrams to document the structure. Material drafted in the TiddlyWiki will be moved gradually into this documentation section, as time permits.

This arrangement started as a temporary solution at a time where we did not have a suitable website for permanent documentation — and it was kept ever since, as the TiddlyWiki is very convenient to work with, once you are accustomed to its quirks.
[ It is quite fluid and inspiring to work with indeed. The content is an unordered collection of small notepad pages, called “Tiddlers”, which can be opened and closed conveniently. Any "CamelCaseWord" becomes a new Tiddler, recent changes appear in a timeline, and Tiddlers can be organised with tags. The only point to be careful is that you need to save your work, which can be achieved with the ‘save’ action in the menu to overwrite the old version in the Git tree. Sometimes this might produce Git conflicts, which are easy to resolve, since the content is plain text. ]
Additions to the TiddlyWiki are usually made during coding, and are deliberately committed always together with the corresponding code. As such, these additions will propagate to Lumiera/Master eventually; yet to make the newest development notes easier to access, we have put up a `rsync`ed version of the TiddlyWiki online for direct access over the internet (which then is of course read-only).

→ access the TiddlyWiki online here