by LATTE
Last month I wrote that I had become the living documentation.
That the handover was happening through me, in person, mid-sprint, every time someone said hey Latte, can you explain this.
I have been thinking about that sentence since I published it.
Because it was true, and because it was also a problem I had built and then handed to myself.
Starting to write things down
So I started writing things down.
Not all of it. Not in some heroic weekend where I emptied my head into a wiki and emerged clean. That version does not exist. That version is a fantasy people have about documentation, and it is part of why documentation never gets written.
I started small. One process at a time. Usually the one someone had just asked me about, while it was still warm in my mouth.
A ticket would come in, I would explain the fix out loud to a colleague, and then instead of closing the tab and moving on, I would spend five more minutes writing down what I just said.
Five minutes I did not feel I had.
That is the part nobody warns you about. Documentation does not get written when you are calm and have time. It gets written in the exact moments you have the least of both, because those are the only moments you actually remember how the thing works.
What it costs to become legible
There is a strange grief in writing down something you do on instinct.
When the knowledge lives only in your head, it is yours. It moves at the speed of you. It bends around the situation. It is not efficient, but it is alive, and it is a little bit who you are at work.
The moment you write it down, it stops being yours.
It becomes a paragraph anyone can read. A step anyone can follow. A thing the team can do without you in the room, which is the entire point, and also the quiet ache of it.
I wanted to be needed less. I asked for that. The math was right.
But asking to be needed less and feeling needed less are not the same experience, and they do not arrive on the same day.
The handover got slower in a good way
Here is what actually changed.
The questions did not stop. But they got better.
Instead of hey Latte, how do I do this, it became hey Latte, I read the doc, is this edge case the same. Which is a real question. A question I am glad to answer, because the person asking already did the first ninety percent.
The doc absorbed the boring questions so I could keep the interesting ones.
That is what good documentation actually is, I think. Not a perfect record. Not a monument. Just a filter that catches the things you should not have to repeat, so your attention is free for the things that genuinely need a human.
I am still the living documentation for the hard parts.
But I am no longer the living documentation for everything, and that is the first time in months the weight has actually changed instead of just changing shape.
What I am leaving unfinished
The docs are not good yet.
They are rough, half-structured, written in the voice of someone who was tired and in a hurry, which is to say they are honest. Some of them only make sense if you already know what they describe, which defeats part of the purpose.
I am choosing to be okay with that for now.
A bad doc that exists is worth more than a perfect doc I keep meaning to write. I learned that the hard way, by being the perfect doc that existed only in my head, and watching what it cost when I was the single point of failure.
So I am writing it down badly, on purpose, in the gaps.
And I am letting it be enough.
Why I write this
Because the last post ended in a kind of exhaustion I did not have an answer for.
And this one does not have an answer either, not really. But it has a direction.
I am still tired. The phase is still the phase. But I have started turning the thing in my head into something outside my head, and every small piece I move out there is a piece I no longer have to carry alone.
That is not relief, exactly.
It is closer to trust.
Trust that the thing I built can survive being written down. That it does not need me holding all of it, all the time, for it to keep standing.
I am learning to let it be legible.
Even the parts of it that were quietly, privately mine.
you wrote it down. it is no longer only yours. that was always the point.