Guides, Documentation

When we landed in Cleveland one of the first tasks we set out to accomplish (and yes, we understand this is uber geeky. Deal with it.) was to visit and tend to our geocache.We had marked the trail with some blaze orange marking tape when we first set the cache. The plastic tape ages over time and gets brittle and starts to degrade. Our first stop after getting into our rented car was Jim's Open Kitchen. After that was, quite oddly, Home Depot, where a acquired some more marking tape.We've not gone to the cache since we moved. While we had walked the trail dozens of times over the years before we left for Seattle we needed the remaining blazes to help us find our way.That got me thinking about documentation. As programmers we uniformly dislike writing it. Using wrong documentation might be, arguably, even worse. But having just a few simple guideposts can make the difference between getting lost and success. The bits of documentation -- the marker tape -- made the difference between easy success and either a delayed or failed attempt.We didn't spend a lot of time marking in the past... or today. But the time we spent was as valuable in the future as good documentation is for software. You don't have to be very anal about it, just enough to save the time of rediscovery of the key features that make your path -- literal or figurative -- to the solution less time-consuming,