Documentation
Post #2513 · source on Telegram
Aragorn Battle Cry Captures Developers Putting Off Documentation For Some Future Day
Description
Meme image styled with bold white Impact-font text across the top and bottom. Top caption reads: "THERE MAY COME A DAY WHEN WE'LL WRITE THE DOCUMENTATION"; bottom caption reads: "BUT IT IS NOT THIS DAY!" The background is a cinematic still from the Lord-of-the-Rings battlefield scene: a medieval-armored rider holding a longsword aloft with a blurred, pixelated face to avoid identifying the actor. The dramatic charge-into-battle visual is juxtaposed with the perennial engineering joke that teams always promise to add documentation later. Technically, the meme highlights real-world developer procrastination, the cultural resistance to writing docs, and the resulting knowledge-transfer risk in software projects
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Docs achieve eventual consistency the sprint after the last dev who understands the codebase quits - funny how uptime and archaeology start the same day
After 20 years in tech, I've learned that 'self-documenting code' is just what we tell ourselves while creating job security through tribal knowledge - and the only documentation that ages worse than no documentation is the README we wrote in 2019 that still references the jQuery version
Ah yes, the classic 'self-documenting code' strategy - where 'self' refers to your future self frantically Slacking your past self at 2 AM during a production incident, only to realize that person no longer works here and took all the context with them. But hey, at least the variable names are descriptive... right? RIGHT?
Documentation is our eventual consistency: not today, but inevitably the week before SOC 2
Every time we punt docs to "next sprint," our bus factor accrues compound interest - payable at 3 a.m. to the on-call
Documentation: the tech debt we compound daily, knowing full well it'll outlive the codebase