The Developer's Sacred Vow on Documentation

Description

This image is a screenshot of a tweet from the popular parody account 'I Am Devloper' (@iamdevloper). The tweet poses a question in the style of a call-and-response from the TV show 'Game of Thrones': 'What do we say to writing documentation?'. The answer, on a new line, is simply 'Not today.'. The humor lies in its relatability to the common tendency among software developers to procrastinate on or entirely avoid writing documentation, which is often seen as a tedious and less engaging task compared to writing code. The 'Not today' reference, famously said by Syrio Forel and Arya Stark about the god of Death, elevates this mundane act of procrastination to a dramatic, almost heroic, defiance

Common Tags

Documentation DeveloperHumor DocumentationAversion TechHumor DocumentationWoes Procrastination RelatableDevExperience

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Code is self-documenting. And other lies we tell ourselves to get through the sprint

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Code is self-documenting. And other lies we tell ourselves to get through the sprint
Anonymous

Our documentation strategy is pure Cassandra: every write is a hinted handoff to future me, who’s been offline since 2012
Anonymous

After 20 years in the industry, I've learned that 'self-documenting code' is just what we tell ourselves while the technical debt collector adds another 15% interest to our README backlog - but hey, at least our Git blame shows we were productive on features that quarter
Anonymous

Every senior engineer knows the three lies of software development: 'I'll write the documentation later,' 'This is just a temporary workaround,' and 'The code is self-explanatory.' Six months later, you're reverse-engineering your own API with a debugger and prayer, wondering why past-you thought variable names like 'processStuff()' and 'handleTheThing()' were sufficient context. The real tragedy? You've now become the tribal knowledge bottleneck you swore you'd never be, fielding Slack messages at 2 AM because nobody - including you - can decipher what that critical service actually does without a seance
Anonymous

Documentation: the load-bearing README we all defer, turning future refactors into multi-week archaeology digs
Anonymous

Our documentation follows eventual consistency - writes always commit 'next sprint', reads hit tribal knowledge with exponential backoff
Anonymous

Our documentation is eventually consistent - guaranteed to materialize right after the first Sev‑1
@uk_rop 5y

Not today, it's Saturday
@yarmoliq 5y

You gotta do something about these people
@nepalymiynik 5y

We wrote tests and generate docs automaticly
@ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 5y

Thats me with my closed source stuff
@SamsonovAnton 5y

"Morgen, morgen, nur nicht heute, sagen alle faulen Leute". (Tomorrow, tomorrow, not today! - That's what lazy people say.)
1. @RiedleroD 5y
  
  Morgen, nicht am selben Tag, weil ich mich nicht hetzen mag. (tomorrow, not on the same day, because I don't want to stress myself)
@sylfn 5y

Не откладывай на завтра то, что не хочешь делать в этой жизни (Don't delay thing until tomorrow if you don't want to do it in you current life)
1. @Dobreposhka 5y
  
  "Не откладывай на завтра то, что можешь съесть сегодня" (Don't delay thing until tomorrow if you can eat it today)
  
  @sylfn 5y
  
  can it it today --> can eat it today
  
  @Dobreposhka 5y
  
  yeah, stupid mistake