Documentation
Post #3775 · source on Telegram
Documentation? We Don't Do That Here
Description
A popular meme using a scene from the Marvel movie 'Black Panther.' The image features the character T'Challa (played by Chadwick Boseman) looking serious and holding up his hand in a stopping gesture. A large, white, all-caps caption at the top reads 'DOCUMENTATION'. Below T'Challa, a subtitled quote from the movie says, '"We don't do that here"'. The meme humorously and cynically portrays a common reality in many software development teams and corporate cultures where writing and maintaining documentation is neglected or actively discouraged in favor of pushing out new features. It resonates with developers who have struggled with undocumented codebases, treating the very idea of documentation as a foreign and unwelcome concept
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Our documentation strategy is simple: the code is the documentation. And the code is a 20-year-old uncommented Perl script
Documentation: the only component with stricter eventual consistency than our distributed datastore - eventually someone will write it, eventually someone will read it, never in the same release cycle
The code is self-documenting, said the developer who just spent three hours reverse-engineering their own API from six months ago
Every senior engineer knows the painful irony: we spend hours in architecture reviews debating the perfect abstraction, then ship it with a README that just says 'TODO: Add documentation.' Six months later, when the original author has moved to a different team, that undocumented service becomes the company's most critical dependency. The real Wakanda Forever is the institutional knowledge we lost along the way because nobody wrote down how the authentication flow actually works
The golden handover rule: undocumented code self-documents via production incidents
Our documentation is event-driven: it only appears after an incident emits a postmortem, which retroactively becomes the spec
If your knowledge base is Slack search and institutional memory, you don’t have microservices - you have a distributed oral tradition