The 80/20 Guide to Technical Documentation for Small Teams
You don't need a 500-page wiki — you need the right documentation, at the right time, for the right audience.
DocumentationEngineeringSMB
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"text": "Documentation is one of those things everyone agrees is important, but nobody actually wants to write. The key is to focus on the 20% of documentation that gives you 80% of the value.",
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"text": "What you must document: 1) Architecture decisions (ADRs) — why you chose X over Y, so future teams don't repeat the same debates. 2) Deployment instructions — how to get code from your laptop to production. 3) Onboarding guide — how to get a new engineer productive in a week.",
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"text": "What you can skip (for now): Inline code comments for obvious code, exhaustive API docs that will be outdated next month, and theoretical architecture diagrams that don't match reality.",
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"text": "The best documentation lives as close to the code as possible. A README in your repo is better than a wiki page somewhere. Comments in your database migration explain why you did what you did.",
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"text": "Documentation doesn't have to be perfect — it just has to be good enough to reduce the bus factor for your team.",
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