> docs that tells you basically that the code is self documented
Anytime someone tells me the code is self-documented I hear "there's no documentation."
The most common programmer's footgun
I don't have time to document
| ^
v |
Spends lots of time trying to understand code
We constantly say we don't have time to document the code. So instead we spend all our time reading code and trying to figure out what it does, to the minimal amount of understanding needed to implement whatever thing we need to implement.
This, of course, itself is naive because you can't know what the minimal necessary information is without knowing something about the whole codebase. Which is also why institutional knowledge is so important and why it is also weird that we'd rather have pay raises through switching companies than through internal raises. That's like trying to fix the damage from the footgun with a footgun.
The most common programmer's footgun
We constantly say we don't have time to document the code. So instead we spend all our time reading code and trying to figure out what it does, to the minimal amount of understanding needed to implement whatever thing we need to implement.This, of course, itself is naive because you can't know what the minimal necessary information is without knowing something about the whole codebase. Which is also why institutional knowledge is so important and why it is also weird that we'd rather have pay raises through switching companies than through internal raises. That's like trying to fix the damage from the footgun with a footgun.