Documentation
Do yourself a favour, even if you are a genius and in your twenties with a healthy brain, consider that after 6 months you don’t remember every detail.
Except very rare case where people can remember any details year after, if it is not your case, accept that you will not remember everything.
At that point, focus first on yourself because you will be the biggest fan of your own writing.
Most people don’t like to write documentation because they think it is boring and a waste of time. The main reason is that people don’t know what to write, how detailed they should be, who are the readers. Are there even any readers?
The first thing to remember is that you are the first reader of your documentation. You will be the first to benefit from it.
In 6 months you will need to know:
- what was the command line to do this and that?
- what tools should I install to compile and run the project?
- how can I connect to the server, the database, the API?
- why did I choose to do that?
For each of these questions, write a note. If something took you a long time to figure out, write a note about it. If you think you have done something clever, write a note about it. If you had to do a workaround because the regular way did not work, write a note about it.
The easiest way to write documentation is to create a folder “doc” or “documentation” in you project and write text files. No skills required, no time to set up, no excuses. You can always improve, refactor, refine, and format later.