Comment by parasti
2 months ago
I upvoted but I was not taught this! I have had to slowly figure it out on my own. Writing things down is kind of like augmenting your brain. It's a memory that does not forget. When working through a problem, writing it down tends to point out the holes in your understanding. A corner case is never lost or forgotten when written down, it just stares at you until you write down a solution. The next step after realizing this is to develop the discipline to write things down and to organize your environment so it's effortless to write things down.
Same, I had to learn this the hard way. In fact, I find that many (younger me included) are arrogant about *not* wanting to deal with writing due to it feeling like waste of time. But after maintaining codebases for 5+ years, you begin to appreciate younger you explaining wtf you were thinking.
And now, being at a point in my career where I have opinions on many things and discuss them with peers, I slowly realized writing about it was actually helping me more than anything.
Using something like confluence religiously in a team is a big boon. Write docs about everything. Write to get decisions done, to plan, to celebrate, to retrospect, to architect, to help oncall. Everything! Doesnt need to be beautiful prose - just needs to be famn useful and ideally easy/quick to read.