How to document like your life depends on it

All the way from startups to giant enterprises, product companies to agencies. We have not yet seen a single organization which documents properly. We’re not talking about them not having any form of documentation at all, they mostly do. We’re talking about “proper” documentation, as in the type of documentation which when you read blows your mind and allows you to get started in as quick as possible.

Why?

Everyone knows how important it is to have beautiful documentation. Yet for some reason no one puts enough love into it. Lack of documentation is one of the biggest contributors to new joiners having a bad onboarding experience as well as our best engineers having decreased levels of productivity. It also worsens cross team communication and hurts ownership.

It becomes even more important when working in an asynchronous environment. Not every colleague of yours will be in the same timezone as you are which makes it crucial for you to properly document you’re work so that your colleague can pick up from where you’ve left off. GitLab (one of the pioneers in the industry on the topic of full-remote) has made their company handbook available to the pubic which contains a lot of valuable information on the importance of documentation in the context of remote work.