Documentation

Rachel Kroll taking about benefits of documenting.

I used to be on a team that was responsible for the care and feeding of a great many Linux boxes which together constituted the “web tier” for a giant social network. You know, the one with all of the cat pictures… and later the whole genocide thing and enabling fascism. Yeah, them.

Anyway, given that we had a six-digit number of machines that was steadily climbing and people were always experimenting with stuff on them, with them, and under them, it was necessary to apply some balance to keep things from breaking too often. There was a fine line between “everything’s broken” and “it’s impossible to roll anything out so the business dies”.

At some point, I realized that if I wrote a wiki page and documented the things that we were willing to support, I could wait about six months and then it would be like it had always been there. Enough people went through the revolving doors of that place such that six months’ worth of employee turnover was sufficient to make it look like a whole other company. All I had to do was write it, wait a bit, then start citing it when needed.

Loved the reference of revolving doors.