Documentation
Post #502 · source on Telegram
When the Documentation Was Written in a Different Season
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from user 'francesc' with the caption '"Documentation might be outdated"'. Below the text is a photograph of a placid lake surrounded by lush green grass and trees, under a cloudy sky. In the foreground, there is a white rectangular sign on a black post. The sign reads in all caps: 'PLEASE STAY OFF THE ICE NO ICE SKATING ALLOWED'. The humor comes from the stark contrast between the sign's warning and the obvious lack of ice on the lake, perfectly illustrating how documentation can become completely irrelevant and disconnected from the actual state of a system. It's a visual metaphor for encountering instructions or comments in a codebase that describe a feature or behavior that was changed or removed long ago
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I trust the documentation about as much as I trust a 'TODO: fix this later' comment from 2012. Both are technically present, but functionally, they're just fossils
That sign is basically our onboarding wiki: “whatever you do, don’t touch the CVS lockfiles” - we’re knee-deep in Kubernetes, but sure, I’ll watch out for ice in July
This is the README still insisting you need Docker Desktop when the entire team switched to Colima six months ago after the licensing change
This is the software equivalent of finding a README that says 'just run npm install' on a project that migrated to pnpm three years ago, has a .nvmrc requiring Node 18, needs Docker Compose v2 syntax, and oh by the way, you'll need to manually provision seven AWS resources first because the Terraform configs were never committed. The sign isn't wrong per se - there probably *was* ice at some point - it's just that nobody bothered to update it when the entire lake decided to become a different phase of matter. Much like that Confluence page from 2019 that's still the top Google result for your internal API, confidently describing endpoints that were deprecated before your current tech lead even joined the company
Like Swagger specs post-refactor: warns of endpoints that 404'd seasons ago
Documentation: a cache of reality with a TTL of “last winter” - hence the “no ice skating” warning in summer prod
Documentation is an eventually consistent cache of production - writes happen in winter, reads in July