If you have the stones to try it

What a twist

What if you only have a nail?

Sounds like you need to add some sleep statements somewhere in your deployment scripts if you want to deploy in 10 seconds

Users are the acceptance testers.

No worries, sounds like you’re definitely on the right track with your approach.

In terms of the style of editor I don’t have a strong preference, I think the most important thing is discoverability which generally means putting docs where they are expected to be found and using whatever your team or org is using. Personally I have a slight preference for markdown mainly because it’s easy to version control, see who wrote what (so I can ask them questions) and use all the tools I’m used to that work well with plain text. Tools that use more WYSIWYG style can be good too though and many of them like Notion have the advantage of making it relatively easy to search across your entire companies documentation assuming everyone uses the one tool.

For my personal notes I use Logseq which I highly recommend. It’s a bit of both, markdown under the hood but with a simple editor that lets you focus on writing notes, tasks and links.

I would say as a new junior dev you are uniquely placed to help with this. Documentation tends to be written by people who know a lot about a thing and they try to imagine what might be useful for someone. Someone new coming in with a fresh perspective can help uncover assumed knowledge or missing leaps to make the documentation better. One of the common onboarding steps I’ve seen is to go back and update/improve the onboarding docs after you’ve just been onboarded for example.

I would say pick your battles though because documentation can be a never ending task and documents are almost always out of date shortly after they are written. Think about what would have saved you time or mental overhead if it was just written down and fix those first.

As far as organising and writing, every place is different and it can depend on the tools your org is using. In general I’d at least have links to relevant docs as close to where they might be needed as possible. Like how to set up and get up and running with a code base should probably be documented directly in the readme, or at least linked to if it’s overly complicated.

Hopefully that’s at least somewhat helpful. It’s definitely a problem basically everywhere I have worked though, you have to do what you can and not stress too much about it.

One might even say it’s an ExtremelyDrawnOutMethodNamesFactoryImpl

Almost certainly

The great thing about schema-less databases is you can put any old thing in there. The bad thing is at some point you have to get it back out again.

No wrong times, only small periods of unfortunate times!

Thanks so much for the explanation. As they say, when a measure becomes a target it stops being a good measure.

Relevant XKCD for good measure.

How can these businesses keep running? Storing and distributing documents isn’t exactly the most technically challenging product to build. I’m not in the field though so I’m absolutely certain I’m missing a lot of the nuances here. Can you shed some light on why you think nobody new comes along to our compete these folks?

Careful, Windows can be vomit inducing.

Or just !! for the last command. Particularly helpful if you forgot to prefix it with sudo you can run sudo !!

I’ve been using Atuin on my work computer and found it to be pretty good if you want something a bit fancier than Ctrl + R

Keep at it! I’m sure you’re heading in the right direction

I’d rather have SteamOS officially support more devices including desktop. Good on Valve for giving people options though.

I was thinking Linux at home would be Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Oh God, this brought back a traumatic memory. I was hanging out after hours at our office to look after a meetup group that was using our space that night. Nothing tricky, make sure people can get in, keep the lights on, make sure nobody sets the place on fire.

I was plugging away on my personal laptop which had Linux on it. Having a great time doing something or other when one of the meetup organisers approached me with a USB stick and asked if I could help them print out some signs to help people know where to go.

My install was rock solid, fast and set up exactly the way I wanted, but in that moment none of that mattered because it was me who froze. I thought back to all the decisions that lead me to that situation, even the conversation with a coworker a few months ago about Linux who literally said “I love Linux but one day I’m just afraid I’ll have to print something or whatever and I won’t be able to”. How foolish I was to dismiss the wisdom in his words that day, and now my worst nightmare had come to pass.

I swallowed hard, looked the organiser in the eyes, and told them I couldn’t help them. I didn’t even try. Best to rip the band-aid off, disappoint them now and get it over with. After the glaring admission left my mouth I waited for the inevitable response. I was a fraud, nothing more than a self proclaimed computer geek who couldn’t accomplish a rudimentary task despite all my time studying and tinkering. It was over, I guess it wasn’t imposter syndrome after all, I really was an imposter and now I’d been discovered.

But instead the the organiser just smiled and said “that’s totally ok, we were just a bit disorganised and didn’t print it before coming this time. Thanks for your help anyway!” And everything was fine. This time.