My Design Docs: A Monument to Poor Planning
Description
The image displays the facade of a generic, beige, two-story office building under a clear blue sky. On the building, in green capital letters, is the sign "DEPARTMENT OF PLANN IN G". The letters "IN" and "G" are crudely tacked on at the end, vertically stacked and misaligned with the rest of the text, humorously undermining the building's supposed purpose. An overlay of white text with a black border at the bottom of the image reads "MY DESIGN DOCS". The meme uses the ironic image of a poorly planned sign on a planning department building as a metaphor for the author's own software design documents, suggesting they are equally ill-conceived, hastily amended, and flawed. It's a self-deprecating joke about the common struggle to create and maintain thorough and coherent technical documentation
Comments
7Comment deleted
My RFC started as a well-architected blueprint. By the time it got through three committees, it looked exactly like this sign: the original idea, plus a bunch of misaligned additions that technically make it complete
Our architecture docs follow the same principle as this sign: split at every structural column, call it “bounded context,” and hope the auditors can read between the gaps
The design doc was so thorough it covered everything except what happens after the happy path, which is why we're now maintaining a distributed monolith with 47 different error states that all return 200 OK
This is the architectural equivalent of a README.md that renders perfectly in your local editor but breaks spectacularly in production when the CI/CD pipeline enforces an 80-character line limit you forgot existed. The Department of Planning clearly didn't run their signage through a linter, and now they're living with a permanent 'TODO: fix text wrapping' comment visible to the entire city. At least when our design docs overflow their containers, we can blame CSS box model quirks - these folks have to explain why they couldn't measure their own building
My design docs implement CAP: Consistent, Accurate, or Published - pick two; after GA they eventually converge to whatever we actually shipped
Design docs: accruing orthographic tech debt before the first commit
My design docs: Department of Plan...ning - pages of boxes and arrows; the “ing” is deferred to post-MVP