Back in 2019, I became aware that publishing documentation for libraries in the Clojure/Script ecosystem was a very manual process that every maintainer had to go through, often at suboptimal results.

Frequently documentation would be outdated or just look very different from project to project, impacting usability.

I wondered: Could we generate documentation automatically, for everyone?

One key challenge stemmed from Clojure being a highly dynamic language, meaning you essentially have to run the code to extract API documentation. This creates a sandboxing problem when you want to analyze any publicly shared project out there.

Perhaps cheating the problem I built a system that runs analysis on CircleCI, kicking of jobs using their API and finally ingesting the resulting data into the cljdoc database.

Today cljdoc is approaching 100.000 documentation builds and is a staple for many Clojure and ClojureScript developers. The project is 'feature-complete' and maintained by Lee Read and myself.