this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2026
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[โ€“] psud@aussie.zone 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Sometimes documentation doesn't help. My workplace used to be waterfall and we still have systems analysts producing documentation

One piece of work came to my team as "this calculation fails in this case and we can't tell why"

Looking at it there were two updates in the documentation showing updates ten years ago the first fixing that corner case with the second fixing a side effect of the fix

Why didn't it work? It was never built, or perhaps built but never merged

On the good side we have an excellent plan for how to fix that corner case, on the bad side we aren't funded to do that amount of work so we have to half arse a solution

[โ€“] tiredofsametab@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago

The documentation I mean here should be in the repo and checked as a part of the PR process. I don't mean it should be a manual, I just mean a readme should at least describe what the service does (it has such a generic name in my case that it's not self-evident and is so broad in scope I don't know what happened). The functions also have terrible naming and no comments to describe what they do. So, as a guy just coming into this team after re-org with no idea what all this stuff does, I was completely lost. They also changed which services which teams owned, further making it difficult to get knowledge.