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The Importance Of Documentation

Olibhia Ghosh on March 06, 2024

Introduction These days nobody prefers any project or code that is not well-documented. In a project, documentation increases readabilit...

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Christine Belzie • Mar 7 '24

There are plenty of documentation tools available, from simple Markdown editors to API generators. Find one that fits your workflow and use it.
What tools do you personally recommend for documentation? For me, my go-to has been @get_pieces. I can save code snippets and their co-pilot feature is helpful if I'm struggling to explain a certain concept. Thanks for sharing @olibhiaghosh! :)

Pieces 🌟 • Mar 7 '24

Thanks for the mention! 🤩

Olibhia Ghosh • Mar 7 '24

I'm a @get_pieces user too. I just love its performance. Specially using GPT4 !!

Pieces 🌟 • Mar 7 '24

Happy you are loving your experience so far! 💃🏼

Michelle Sanseverino • Mar 7 '24

That's an amazing article! Congrats!

I'm working as Technical Documentation Analyst, here in Brazil, and I see how important is to document everything we do. Now, I work writing manuals but, before, I used to work with the internal technology team. There, I needed to use every knowledge I had so I could write to dev but also to someone who doesn't have a dev background.

Now, as I'm studying to become a dev, I see how important it to be able to share all the technical knowledge with a good documentation.

Thank you so much for this article. I'm sure it's going to help a lot of people!

Olibhia Ghosh • Mar 7 '24

Glad you liked it !!

Dimitri Mostrey • Mar 8 '24

Thanks for reminding us to the importance of documentation. Another possible bulletpoint is: Reminding ourselves how the code works.

We probably went all through the painful process of re-opening a project of years ago. Unless you have an elephant memory it goes like Did I write this? Never mind finding the bug or the insight to update or add new features.

We learn. We improve. Languages evolve. New techniques/frameworks. We outwit ourselves at times. Even international acknowledged standards change (may/must/should/...).

To the point of embarrassment of What the heck was I thinking? I guess it's normal. So I started documenting code... for myself. At first.

Last but not least. What happens if you sell a project/website? My guess is, a well documented (private) project augments the value thereof.

Olibhia Ghosh • Mar 8 '24

Thanks for sharing your POV !!

johnblommers • Mar 7 '24

I'm finding that just keeping a daily journal in Markdown using MindForger has strong benefits later on. The Markdown files have a much better memory than my brain does.

And after a few years it's amazing how much knowledge one accumulates in a journal.

Given recent developments in self-hosted large language models (LLM) I'm looking forward to exploring locally hosted LLMs so I can have discussions with my multi-year Markdown journal.