Ignorance is StrengthΒΆ
| Authors: | Amalia Hawkins |
|---|---|
| Time: | 11:00 - 11:40 |
| Session: | http://docs.writethedocs.org/2014/na/talks/#amalia-hawkins-ignorance-is-strength-writing-documentation-by-learning-as-you-go |
| Link: |
“Writing documentation by learning as you go.”
We usually think about ignorance as the enemy, something that we want to overcome using documentation. But it’s when we have that struggle ourselves, we’re in a good position to understand what users need to know.
Hawkins graduated in May, and started working in August. In college, she was the lead TA for an Intro to CS course, and worked on hiring approximately 30 TAs for the course. What she discovered was that the best TAs weren’t always they students who effortlessly got A’s; the ones that had to work hard to get their B often understood the struggles of incoming students better.
When Hawkins started working at Mongo in August, she was enthusiastic, ignorant, and not much else, and there was > 1MM lines of code to understand. A lack of internal documentation makes scaling the team more difficult.
So after she figured out the problem in front of her (via a conversation with the CTO), she wanted to share what she’d learned. She talked to the documentation head, who suggested: write anything, even if it’s wrong. Because even if it’s wrong, people now have something to respond to and critique.
And people responded positively: “Wow, I didn’t know about that, that’s helpful.” “I’m so glad someone wrote about this. Someone should also write about X, Y, and Z.” So you need to find your allies, and help spread the work around.