Monday Coffee 2017-02-13

Man, if there was an award for procrastinating I’d definitely be in with a shout for today (I write these posts on the weekend). 

So I’m half writing this sitting on my balcony with a beer, one eye on the Italy v Ireland Six Nations game and trying not to think about all the work I should be doing. 

Anyway one thing I’ve been thinking about is documentation. Nobody likes doing it but oh boy did it help me out last week. 

We had one of our production servers fail during a RAM upgrade. No biggie as it was a passive node in a cluster but whilst we were writing up our steps to rebuild one of my colleagues forwarded a wiki page detailing the server’s configuration. Awesome stuff, we had a complete list of what we needed to do, the thing that made me laugh was that it was written….by me. 

I honestly don’t remember writing that document and yes, it was slightly out of date but it had steps on it which we would have completely forgotten to do if we didn’t have it. 

So yes, writing documentation sucks but it’s one of those chores that can really help you out. 

So don’t put it off, get that code/server spec/process documented. You’ll thank yourself in the end. 

Have a good week.