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by sksxihve 605 days ago
Keeping a paper trail of what you've done in the ticket, issues you came across, and questions you've had while working on something, even if you were able to answer them yourself is great advice that really separates junior from senior devs.
1 comments

I do a lot of documenting but not for the paranoid reasons in the article but to leave breadcrumbs for any person, including myself, who might need to look for information in the future.

I've worked long enough to get absolutely tired of yet-another-archaelogy-trip to figure out business logic, a reason for that weird counter-intuitive implementation, how exactly a bug was detected and fixed, why the architecture looks this way, so on and so forth.

It's one of the most draining and stupidest part of this job.

When I bump into someone's else work who diligently left breadcrumbs scattered around; in commit messages, PR descriptions, comments, history of tickets, etc. I almost literally jump with joy.

It's a gift to the future that I really enjoy paying forward, hoping I can instill this feeling unto someone else, again: including myself.

Nothing makes me more sad than seeing a PR with the default description like 'Closes FOO-123'.

Conversely nothing makes me happier than an informative description especially when it states how the PR was tested. Sometimes I don't even need to look at the code.