Leveling up with Documentation
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Humanity has documented events, stories, and ideas for tens of thousands of years. Being an entrepreneur, a freelance developer, or part of a team is no different. If you're not writing things down, you're not going to have the insights and history needed for growth.
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Leveling up with Documentation
- 3. Mike Fisher
- 4. Jenn Vargas
- 5. /** * There, I * documented it **/
- 6. Handoff
- 8. Development
- 9. Calendars
- 10. What’s next?
- 14. Tools
- 15. The tools work for you.
- 17. Hermagoras of Temnos Qui, quid, quando, ubi, cur, quem ad modum, quibus adminiculis
- 18. Who, what, when, where, why, in what way, by what means
- 19. Juhan Sonin
Editor's Notes
- The stick fell against her leg. It was still warm from the fire. It didn't burn her, but it left a black line along her leg from the charred end. She looked at the line on her leg. Picking up the stick her fingers came away black from the soot. This meant something. Dragging the burned end of the stick on a rock, she saw how it left a line. As she turned the stick once, then again, lines became patterns and she got excited. She needed a bigger rock.
- The paintings in the caves at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, Lascaux, Altamira, Pettakere, and others around the world show early people recording their surroundings as far back as some 35000 years. Images of different animals may have been to record what game was nearby. Maybe to commemorate an event, a successful hunt, perhaps. Some of the art may have been protective in nature. Wards against evil or illness. Early people began to record their relationship with the world. To record experiences, thoughts, events, for those who came after.
- Today we call this Documentation. How you document the parts of your work, your business, can be one of the most important things you can do to improve and grow.
- This talk isn't just "be sure to write down what that line of code does." There are many other areas where good documentation plays a role in your business. When you get in the habit of doing this, now you're ready to level up.
- Client vetting, discovery, design, development, deployment - Critical information needs to be recorded during all stages. Especially before the handoff.
- a) Logins, credentials b) Workflow c) Billing & invoicing details
- Code libraries Inline documentation - classes, methods, functions, mixins, etc. Patterns Modules Solutions noted blog post internal article white papers
- Set repeat events Mark followups Publishing schedule
- Do you know the types of projects you're best at? Do you know the types of clients & projects that are most profitable? Have you noticed trends?
- April 21, 2015 - May 7, 2015 - 3 WordPress security releases. You have to do these updates, but you still have scheduled work. Deadlines. If you're scrambling around trying to figure out who needs what, you're losing time. If you already know who has what version of WordPress, all your hosting info is recorded, your credentials, then you're in a much better position.
- Use the 5 Ws as a starting point. Identify challenges and solutions. Hosting “gotchas” Were any new tools, libraries, procedures used? Did you create any new modules? Plugins? Time to complete project? Effective hourly rate?
- Google docs - interlinked sheets. Single source feeding multiple “views”. CRM - Associate data with your customers WordPress - Ease of use, API, custom fields Github Wikis - Project-specific data Version your documentation - Github, WordPress revisions.
- If you don't know the answer to a question, you write the question down. If you ask the same question a week later, the answer should be written down. If you inherit a project that hasn't been touched in 6 months, do you magically know all the details for that project? Did anyone record necessary information?
- Hermagoras of Temnos - tried to systematize the art & skill of rhetoric. In doing so, he developed a way of analyzing a topic into it's "seven circumstances". We know this today as the 5 Ws, which serves as a way to ensure thoroughness in a subject.
- If you don't know what to record, go to the basics. Who, what, when, where, why, in what way, by what means
- In 1995, Dr. Brendan Reilly become chairman of the Department of Medicine at Chicago's Cook County Hospital, the city's principal public hospital. 250K patients visit the Emergency Dept. every year. You can imaging the pressure about how to take care of everyone. Dealing with heart attacks is at the top of that pressure. And that's what Dr. Reilly did. Reilly looked at the work of a cardiologist named Lee Goldman. In the 1970s, Goldman started using mathematical principles to help decide if someone really was suffering a heart attack. He came up with an algorithm to remove much of the guesswork out of treating chest pain, and used this to create a decision tree of treatment options. Dr. Reilly's implementing of this new method of analysis resulted in a dramatic improvement in correctly identifying patients. In 2001, Cook County Hospital became one of the first in the country to devote itself full-time to the Goldman algorithm for chest pain.