These last few days I have been feeling especially uninspired to blog, on any of my blogs. In fact, I started three posts tonight on two different blogs, and ended up round filing them. I am also feeling quite tired tonight, case in point: I fell asleep whilst watching my favourite hockey team play for first place. (That would be the Montreal Canadiens, in case you were wondering.) I never, and I mean never fall asleep watching hockey! So I guess that means I’m one tired writer. Work has been pretty good these days, as I’ve put the wiki reorg slightly on hold while I research a new wiki software solution. And I’ve also been moving along nicely on getting my other documentation projects going at work, which is good. My boss said to me in my post-year review a few weeks back that he’s about “results”, and that while he knows that I’ve made good headway on a lot of things, and he knows I am working hard, he’d like to see more “concrete results” from me this year. So I’m trying to make a good effort at producing those. But working in a non-deadline driven environment makes it extremely hard. I’m not used to this type of pressure, as I’m used to getting end user documentation ready for a release on certain days of the year. So this open-ended “just document the system the way it is” mandate I’ve got is a little more fluid and ephemeral than I’m used to.
But I am definitely enjoying it. It’s fun trying to get the information out of the heads of the developers in my group, and trying to get them thinking about documentation. The easiest part of that equation is getting them to comment their code properly so we can automatically generate “good” documentation from it. (Plus it has the added benefit of helping out their fellow colleagues too.) The more difficult part, and of course this is my task, is trying to get them to write up a quick doc about their work, that explains anything that needs to be configured, set up, or in general just explained. I keep telling them that they don’t need to make things fancy, that’s my job.
“Just write it down. That’s all I ask. A bullet point list, a run-on sentence that goes on for half a page, it doesn’t matter,” I tell them. “Just write it down.”
I’ve got the backing of both the Dev team lead and the Director of Development, so that’s good. In fact, they know how important it is because the information I need to write down is all in their two heads, but until someone invents those USB ports for our memories like in the Johnny Mnemonic novel by William Gibson, there’s no easy way to get the information out of their heads. haha. So this is what we’ve come up with. We/I’ve made a good start too, as a couple of the developers have already submitted some documents for “TW massaging”. I’m excited at the direction we’re taking with this idea, so let’s see how it goes.
Hmm, I guess I was a little more inspired than I thought in writing this post. See what happens when you ‘just do it’?
