[Pxtl]

A big part of it is that imho technology has gotten more powerful, but still no easy to use. Like, I'm imagining in 20 years the API for Amazon's drone fleet will be here and we'll still be like "wait, the address parameter is for an IP address? And the library isn't thread-safe but also doesn't connection pool so I have to maintain one dronecloud client per thread? And what's this cryptic "rotor invert" error?

It feels like half my job is googling how to do common things in popular libraries and finding completely counter-intuitive pain-points.

[thatoneuser]

A great example of this is AWS. I'm not a power user but I dabble. You have to go back and forth through user docs that all have some % of the correct steps, but no single doc has all of the correct steps. Some reference deprecated api, some just never seemed to work in the first place and you wonder how it even got there.

I get that these ecosystems evolve over time but I'm not convinced that that evolution requires inability to use the underlying features effectively.

[Acen]

I connect with this at a spiritual level right now.

We're building some new infrastructure for a service that is also new, using terraform. Which only our devops have used before.

It's an interesting time.

AWS Cognito with app clients and not user pools + AWS API gateway, connecting to a system linked with dynamodb, Kinesis data stream and firehose.

Like each part stand alone is documented okay with specific circumstances. But nothing interlinking at anything past the basic level.

Trial and error is brutal.

[hallman76]

You're trying to take off while still building the plane. So is AWS.

[isubasinghe]

Oh I can relate to this a lot as well, it is really hard to get some services on AWS working together. There is documentation but its always not enough. I find stackoverflow + trial and error the best way to resolve issues but it is quite a painful dev experience

[thinkingemote]

Hah! Worse is over a day you open a dozen or so pages about a topic lets say SES and scan through them then later youre back to looking for some thing which you know exists on one of the pages and now you have to trawl over everything again trying to find it seemingly at random.

It's like you need to keep an index of things in your head when reading AWS docs as you know the information is dispersed across multiple different places.

[ddxxdd]

I feel like Android and iPhone programming are exactly the same way. The official documentation is confusing and worthless to me.