Comment by SketchySeaBeast
2 hours ago
I've found that the real trick with documentation isn't creation, it's discovery. I wonder how that information is easily found afterwards.
2 hours ago
I've found that the real trick with documentation isn't creation, it's discovery. I wonder how that information is easily found afterwards.
If ownerless code doesn’t result in discoverability efforts then the whole thing goes off the rails.
I won’t remember this block of code because five other people have touched it. So I need to be able to see what has changed and what it talks to so I can quickly verify if my old assumptions still hold true
By reading the documentation thoroughly as a compulsory first step to designing the next system that depends on it.
I realise this may probably boggle the mind of the modern software developer.
I used to take this approach when building new integrations. Then I realized (1) most documentation sucks (2) there's far too much to remember (3) much of it is conditional (4) you don't always know what matters until it matters (e.g. using different paths of implementation).
What works much better is having an intentional review step that you come back to.
That is not how this usually works.
Most of the time QA can tell you exactly how the product works, regardless of what the documentation says. But many of us haven’t seen a QA team in five, ten years.
You say this like trivial misstakes did not happen all the time in classical engineering as well.
If there is a memory leak, them this is a flaw, that might not matter so much for a specific product, but I can also easily see it being forgotten, if it was maybe mentioned somewhere in the documentation, but maybe not clear enough and deadlines and stress to ship are a thing there as well.
Just try harder. And if it still breaks, clearly you weren't trying hard enough!
At some point you have to admit that humans are pretty bad at some things. Keeping documentation up to date and coherent is one of those things, especially in the age of TikTok.
Better to live in the world we have and do the best you can, than to endlessly argue about how things should be but never will become.
> especially in the age of TikTok
Shouldn't grey beards, grizzled by years of practicing rigorous engineering, be passing this knowledge on to the next generation? How did they learn it when just starting out? They weren't born with it. Maybe engineering has actually improved so much that we only need to experience outages this frequently, and such feelings of nostalgia are born from never having to deal with systems having such high degrees of complexity and, realistically, 100% availability expectations on a global scale.
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For the new system to be approved, you need to document the properties of the software component that are deemed relevant. The software system uses dynamic allocation, so "what do the allocation patterns look like? are there leaks, risks of fragmentation, etc, and how do we characterise those?" is on the checklist. The new developer could try to figure this all out from scratch, but if they're copying the old system's code, they're most likely just going to copy the existing paperwork, with a cursory check to verify that their modifications haven't changed the properties.
They're going to see "oh, it leaks 3MiB per minute… and this system runs for twice as long as the old system", and then they're going to think for five seconds, copy-paste the appropriate paragraph, double the memory requirements in the new system's paperwork, and call it a day.
Checklists work.