A Developer's Solemn Vow Against Paperwork
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from the popular satirical Twitter account 'I Am Devloper' (@iamdevloper), which uses a profile picture of the character Napoleon Dynamite. The tweet is formatted as a call and response. The question posed is, 'What do we say to writing documentation?'. The answer, on a separate line below it, is simply, 'Not today.'. The humor is a direct and widely recognized parody of a famous quote from the TV series 'Game of Thrones,' where the character Syrio Forel teaches Arya Stark to say 'Not today' to the God of Death. By substituting 'the God of Death' with 'writing documentation,' the meme poignantly captures the universal and deeply ingrained reluctance of many software developers to engage in the tedious but necessary task of documenting their code, treating it as a fate to be perpetually postponed
Comments
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'We'll document it in the next sprint.' - The most frequently recurring, perpetually unresolved ticket in Jira history
Our docs are a write-behind cache - code hits prod in milliseconds, the words finally flush to Confluence sometime after the engineer’s exit interview
The same developer who postponed writing docs in 2019 is now the principal engineer explaining to the new team why the critical payment service is "self-documenting code" with comments like "// TODO: explain this dark magic before I forget."
Documentation is like the God of Death: you can dodge it daily, but eventually it claims you - usually during the on-call shift after the author resigns
Every senior engineer knows the three hardest problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and convincing yourself that 'the code is self-documenting' isn't just technical debt with better PR. We've all been that architect who schedules 'Documentation Sprint' for Q4 2025, knowing full well it'll get pushed to Q1 2026, then quietly archived when the team pivots to the next shiny framework
Our documentation strategy: say “Not today,” then publish the postmortem as an ADR
Documentation: the God of Death for dev velocity - 'Not today' ensures tomorrow's maintainer gets all the glory of psychic debugging
We practice eventual documentation: a CRDT of tribal knowledge that resolves conflicts at 3am when PagerDuty forces a merge