Humans tend to remember stories much better than mere facts, which probably is why storytelling has such a long tradition in human history.

Storyteller is – quoting from their own description – an “editor plugin that generates web pages that recreate and animate entire programming sessions” (see this playback repository for examples and the project’s GitHub repository for more details).

It’s an interesting, novel take on software documentation in that instead of merely describing some current state of code and what it’s supposed to do it allows the developer to record both the process of creating the code and the thinking that went into it as well as the rationale behind it in a dynamic, story-like fashion.

This approach could lend itself particularly well to scenarios such as:

• code reviews
• developer on-boarding
• knowledge sharing within a company and a wider developer community
• providing learning resources to your team