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| documentation [2024/08/29 00:06] – ['code is law'] qlyoung | documentation [2024/08/29 00:16] (current) – qlyoung | ||
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| - | I strongly appreciate excellent technical documentation. You can have a great piece of software but if it's difficult to understand how to use it, users will fail to appreciate it. | + | ====== documentation ====== |
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| + | I strongly appreciate excellent technical documentation. You can have a great piece of software but if it's difficult to understand how to use it, at best users will fail to appreciate it and at worst huge amounts of time will be wasted and vast quantities of errors committed. | ||
| Because I appreciate good documentation for tools I use I do my best to write useful documentation. In addition to the obvious benefit, which is that good documentation saves everyone time, I find there are several additional benefits specific to the act of writing documentation: | Because I appreciate good documentation for tools I use I do my best to write useful documentation. In addition to the obvious benefit, which is that good documentation saves everyone time, I find there are several additional benefits specific to the act of writing documentation: | ||
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| ===== culture ===== | ===== culture ===== | ||
| - | In a professional context, company culture frequently does not incentivize documentation. Technical output is rewarded. Documentation output is not. This is extremely common, but it is bad for the organization as a whole. Suppose you commit an engineer to building out a complex system, but there are no cultural incentives for the engineer to write good documentation, | + | In a professional context, company culture frequently does not incentivize documentation. Technical output is rewarded. Documentation output is not. This is extremely common, but it is bad for the organization as a whole. Suppose you commit an engineer to building out a complex system, but there are no cultural incentives for the engineer to write good documentation, |
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| + | Of course, some teams are explicitly aware of that tradeoff. Externalizing cost to other teams means your team can be more productive - at the cost of the org. Dsyfunctional workplaces incentivize this behavior. | ||
| In extreme cases, this can result in the entire product being rebuilt by a different person or team because no one can understand how to use the first product. | In extreme cases, this can result in the entire product being rebuilt by a different person or team because no one can understand how to use the first product. | ||
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| - KP realizes there are no docs. KP spends 2 minutes creating a docs page, writes down the answer, gives it to the user. | - KP realizes there are no docs. KP spends 2 minutes creating a docs page, writes down the answer, gives it to the user. | ||
| - | Now the user has that docs page to share with anyone facing the same problem and KP can spend less time answering that question in the future | + | Now the user has that docs page to share with anyone facing the same problem and KP can spend less time answering that question in the future. This saves everybody time and improves morale. |
| ===== docs pitfalls ===== | ===== docs pitfalls ===== | ||
documentation.1724889994.txt.gz · Last modified: 2024/08/29 00:06 by qlyoung
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