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Discussion on: Does documenting feel productive?

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Spyros Argalias

There is definitely value in writing documentation. Documentation about the implementation is mostly: "I might forget how this works, so I'm writing my notes here so I can see it later."

There is more documentation such as:

  • An overview / tour of the codebase for newcomers or people that haven't used a particular area.
  • Why a particular implementation was chosen.
  • Tons of non-technical documentation about the project, why some decisions were made, design documentation, tons of stuff in general.

It's all useful.

Why is it bothersome? In my opinion:

  1. Because it would be better if it wasn't needed. As mentioned, a lot of it is comments for stuff that wouldn't be immediately obvious without it.
  2. Because we don't want to write long documents for why X was done and to document what we're doing. We just want to do the work.
  3. It needs constant maintenance... Outdated documentation could be worse than no documentation, because it can be confusing and misleading.

I'm curious to see other answers, as these are just my personal experiences.