10 Reasons Why Documentation is a Startup Secret Sauce
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Re: 10 Reasons Why Documentation is a Startup Secret Sauce
#2Nice article. Author doesn't mention one key point: your documentation MUST BE SINCERE. Nothing is more hilarious (and will derail you faster) than some B.S. mission statement on the front door.
Re: 10 Reasons Why Documentation is a Startup Secret Sauce
#3Personally, I'm suspicious of anyone who doesn't document what they did. If you are unable to take the time to leave a trail of your thought processes and reasons then the understanding you claim to have about your domain is suspect. The only exception is if it's throw away code.
Re: 10 Reasons Why Documentation is a Startup Secret Sauce
#4We have a concept we call our "Bus Number." It's the number of people that know how to do what you do, or have been briefed on what you're doing, so that if you're run over by a bus, they can pick up what you're doing. It's a grim concept, but it highlights another point: what happens during the startup period should a key person fall ill, or die? Good documentation could save the shop and make sure your dream lives, at least for a while longer.
Re: 10 Reasons Why Documentation is a Startup Secret Sauce
#5This is basically the rational behind the E-Myth. Your business is not just another job you do. It's a self-sustaining entity that you create.
Re: 10 Reasons Why Documentation is a Startup Secret Sauce
#6What do you guys use for documentation, btw? I used DocBook for Hecl, but man is it ever a PITA. It's very, very, very, verbose, and even if that verbosity does give you a lot of flexibility, I'm not sure it's worth it in terms of docs that don't get written because it takes so long.
Re: 10 Reasons Why Documentation is a Startup Secret Sauce
#7[deleted]
Re: 10 Reasons Why Documentation is a Startup Secret Sauce
#8What do you guys use for documentation, btw? I used DocBook for Hecl, but man is it ever a PITA. It's very, very, very, verbose, and even if that verbosity does give you a lot of flexibility, I'm not sure it's worth it in terms of docs that don't get written because it takes so long.
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Re: 10 Reasons Why Documentation is a Startup Secret Sauce
#9What do you guys use for documentation, btw? I used DocBook for Hecl, but man is it ever a PITA. It's very, very, very, verbose, and even if that verbosity does give you a lot of flexibility, I'm not sure it's worth it in terms of docs that don't get written because it takes so long.
A wiki would probably work well. A Google Site perhaps?
Re: 10 Reasons Why Documentation is a Startup Secret Sauce
#10We have a concept we call our "Bus Number." It's the number of people that know how to do what you do, or have been briefed on what you're doing, so that if you're run over by a bus, they can pick up what you're doing. It's a grim concept, but it highlights another point: what happens during the startup period should a key person fall ill, or die? Good documentation could save the shop and make sure your dream lives,…
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TruckNumber
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Anyway, documentation is all well and good when it takes the form of a "how to". That seems to be what the author is getting at. But there's just nothing worse than reading or writing documentation that consists of proposed method signatures, object structures, or anything in any way related to UML.