this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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[โ€“] noughtnaut@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I have never put it into words like that, more like "make zero assumptions".

I suppose that being overly thorough can make documentation prone to becoming tedious (unless cares is taken to not talk down to the reader) or too tightly coupled (incurring the need to be updated more often as details of the process change).

How do you usually deal with that aspect? What I do is to make the documentation easily skimmable (for advanced readers) and just accept the need for rework.

[โ€“] Alaknar@lemm.ee 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

How do you usually deal with that aspect? What I do is to make the documentation easily skimmable (for advanced readers) and just accept the need for rework.

Confluence's "Expand" element. Make everything into an easy to read task-list, but if more details are necessary, just expand a step and get an "idiot proof" description. Bookstack allows that as well, even better, because you can nest them (Confluence had that up until they "updated" the editor and killed half the features).

EDIT: "Include Page" in Confluence also works wonders here. For example, I have an article describing how to RDP to our AD server. In all articles that describe a process that needs to be done on the AD server, I just include that page. If any connection details change, I just edit the original article and the changes immediately propagate to all the other instances.