21–30 of 70 posts
Where can I document things? If I put it on my person blog google won't find it - preferring instead SEO blogspam. If I document something but nobody reads it (including me), then the effort was wasted.
Good thought, but > I figure that if you have knowledge that could benefit thousands of people, and it costs you next to nothing to share that knowledge, it’s your duty to do it. As someone who has written a lot of docs over the years, there can often be a very high cost in terms of time and effort to document something.
However, I wrote this post while thinking about easy fixes that are really hard to discover, such as this one yesterday: https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/playwright-timeouts
Good thought, but > I figure that if you have knowledge that could benefit thousands of people, and it costs you next to nothing to share that knowledge, it’s your duty to do it. As someone who has written a lot of docs over the years, there can often be a very high cost in terms of time and effort to document something.
Unfortunately, I am not as competent and blaze fewer trails.
After the duty to document, comes the duty to expose it : - How do you format that doc ? which is particularly relevant if you'd like to roam around. the author's Berlin guide is a good example [1] - How do you find exactly what you want ? Some say that there's no longer (or lesser) need to document because we have LLMs. I would argue the exact opposite : Given their ability to streamline the retrieval process (into…
What will you train the LLM on? It has to get the information from somewhere. This is a point I'm supposed to make next month in a panel about using AI to help immigrants. An LLM won't make phone calls.
Inside the workplace, I find that people mostly don’t read documentation, but I write it anyway, because I tend to go back to it as a reference, and I can point others to it when they ask questions.
The older you get the more you realize that every popular piece of software got that way not because it was necessarily the best, but because it was the best documented. Often the tail wags the dog here as well. The software becomes better as it is documented.
Good thought, but > I figure that if you have knowledge that could benefit thousands of people, and it costs you next to nothing to share that knowledge, it’s your duty to do it. As someone who has written a lot of docs over the years, there can often be a very high cost in terms of time and effort to document something.
Good thought, but > I figure that if you have knowledge that could benefit thousands of people, and it costs you next to nothing to share that knowledge, it’s your duty to do it. As someone who has written a lot of docs over the years, there can often be a very high cost in terms of time and effort to document something.
The worst cost of documentation is that it often generates extra work for you in terms of complaints and updates. Not always reasonable ones, either. More than a few personal projects have been taken offline because it's too demoralizing to give things away and get negativity back.
Good thought, but > I figure that if you have knowledge that could benefit thousands of people, and it costs you next to nothing to share that knowledge, it’s your duty to do it. As someone who has written a lot of docs over the years, there can often be a very high cost in terms of time and effort to document something.
The worst cost of documentation is that it often generates extra work for you in terms of complaints and updates. Not always reasonable ones, either. More than a few personal projects have been taken offline because it's too demoralizing to give things away and get negativity back.