Learning to Program

Document for Others

If you work with other people, you need to write documentation for their benefit as well. Writing documentation with an audience in mind will make your documentation more direct and useful. Ask yourself, “When a new developer reads this comment, will he understand why I made this decision?” If you don’t work with other people yet, you should still write documentation for other people—eventually, someone else might take over your project. I built my first big project (that website I keep talking about) alone over the course of about two years. I spent very little time writing documentation, partially because I was so busy writing code and partially because I didn’t really see the value in writing documentation; I was the only ...