Key takeaways
- Docs speed onboarding and preserve knowledge when people leave.
- Document: setup, architecture, decisions, APIs, deployment.
- Simple and findable beats perfect and comprehensive.
Documentation feels like overhead. But when someone leaves, gets sick, or when you need to onboard quickly, it's the difference between chaos and continuity.
Onboarding
New devs need to understand the system. Good docs get them productive faster. Bad docs mean weeks of 'where does this live?' and 'why did we do it this way?'
Knowledge retention
When the person who built it leaves, the docs are the backup. Architecture decisions, API contracts, deployment steps. Without them, you're reverse-engineering.
What to document
- Setup and run instructions
- Architecture overview
- Key decisions and why
- API contracts and usage
- Deployment and ops runbooks
Keep it simple
Docs don't need to be perfect. They need to exist and be findable. A README is better than nothing. Update as you go.
FAQs
Notion, Confluence, or plain Markdown in the repo. Pick something the team will actually use.
Update as part of the workflow. PRs that change behaviour should update docs. Make it a habit.