Hello friends 😊
I just need to get this of my chest

But at my school we currently have this project where we need to create a webapp eventually which is nice. BUT first we NEED to spend a whole semester documenting stuff! I mean some things are necessary I know that! But a whole semester ffs I'm studying to be programmer so I WANT TO CODE STUFF

Why is my school like this 😩

I'm in same situation.

@darkLord i feel for you man

Good do that first.

You document architecture and database design and process flow.
And when you are not intetested in this web app.

The other new guy will follow your documented design and finish it off as expected.

I feel you, partially because im in your project group

This is really important. It may be boring as hell but any enterprise level shop that is good at development will make you document all your work.

You should get used to writing documentation. Coding is only half the battle.

Good documentation saves lives and covers your ass as a developer as it allows new devs/pm to also pickup your work where you left off and provides explanations for why you did things the way you do.

I know lots of Jr devs want to jump right into coding but then at a certain point they get stuck because they didn't architect their dev plan well enough or at all and now their costing a project lost dev hours.

The addage of "measure twice, cut once" is very true here. Document twice, code once.

#!rant #comment

@Vip3rDev It's important but when you end up doing documentation for 9 out of the 10 project weeks, you're fucking done with it!

The little amount of programming i know is selftaught, and i find myself lacking the ability to document my stuff. On a good day, i remember to put in some comments now and then.

@illusion466 At my study they required documentation above anything. Resulting in students quitting because they weren't allowed to code in nearly half a fucking year. The exams were 95 percent documenting for me, I really thought about throwing it all away because I couldn't take that bullshit anymore!

@illusion466 most of the teachers know this I'm sure of that, but still insist this bull crap I know it's important but as you said documenting for 10 weeks give or take is killing in and of itself. And most of the time it doesn't even work like that in "the real world" I'm glad you understand my pain ☺️

@linuxxx Fair point. That's excessive.

I would want to say I'm not defending the amount of documentation, but that the act of commenting or documenting in as of itself is important and to not dismiss it so quickly, as many developers don't flex this skillset enough.

But in this specific case yeah that does sound like balls.

I also agree with @illusion466 that after a week or so of working on specs or docs that you do start to stub out your code. You can only document so much before it's overkill and all "theoretical" now until you actually spin it up.

In agile you want to fail hard and fail often so that's better at the start so you can fix shit and identify hidden scope creep so you can cut that fat out and actually make it to the end of the project.

@Vip3rDev They wanted us to document all code (classes and objects etc etc) before writing anything. Might work for some people but my brain doesn't work like that :/

@linuxxx Oh god. Even for some code level stuff your IDE can auto document classes and functions and stuff. That's balls. I can't work like that either. I'd never get to actual coding!

I'm talking like server architecture diagrams and cloud infrastructure setups for load balancing. Or, translating your project scope into quick business logic psudocode so there is a base to start from that developers agree upon.

If I start writing docs and it ends up looking like a research paper, something is wrong. Nay nay good sir!

@Vip3rDev I actually counted the amount of pages of coding vs documentation at my exams. Don't remember it exactly but something like:
Code: 8-10 pages
Documentation: 150-200 pages.

😭

Documentation is not bad. But documentation is not the ONLY thing. Like teach documentation for 40% of semester and 60 in implementing. Then the documentation will be used and we will learn why it is important while developing real application.

@linuxxx Oh jeez. That's brutal. I would lose my shit.

"Ever see a developer beat someone with their own keyboard? Because your about to..."

It's just preparing you for what's coming