Manager: Hey, this is Junior. he will work with you from now on.
Me: Oh cool, we could use some help.
(moments later...)
Junior: Hey i got this error. Im new with this engine. sorry.
Me: It cool, then you should read the documentation first. its all there. including your error.
Junior: whats documentation?
Me: ...

For all the cunts ever existed! what do they teach to programmers in college these days?!

"there's a problem with your API"
Me: "why?"
"I get no data"
Me: "what response code are you getting?"
"405 - Method not allowed. But only on the /version endpoint"
Me: "Soo... What request are you sending?"
"POST"

WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU SEND A POST REQUEST TO AN ENDPOINT THAT **GETS** THE VERSION OF MY API???!!!!

Me: "Read the documentation. It's there for a reason"

She - So. Do you read ?

Me - Yes. Infact a lot. Daily. My life is filled with it.

She - Wow. Nice. So what do you read mostly ? Which one is your favourite

Me - Mostly Documentations. Vuejs documentation is my favourite followed by express and mongodb documentation. And yeah webpack. You should read them too. Then there is a book on ES6, 'Understanding ES6' by Nikolas S Zakas, famous author and programmer. Great stuff

##Real fuckening STORY##
Angry client: this feature is not working like we discussed !

Me: it is.. *giving some explanation*

Client : no, this is not the right way

Me: But this is what we documented while gathering requirements, and YOU signed in the documentation..

Client : that long document? you don't expect me to read all of that talk just for this simple feature..

Me inside: *killing him 5 times in 5 different ways

Newspaper: This CEO is one of the top entrepreneurs in the country, a true tech visionary shaping the future.

--- 3 months previous ---

Lead dev: O2 have said they are will pre-install the app on all their Androids but they need documentation from us.

CEO: documentation? on what?

Lead dev: Our unit test coverage, bugs found / fixed, security scan results, performance assessment, if and where its storing any data etc.

CEO: Ah were not doing any of that crap, bloody unit tests, its not necessary, tell them no.

lead dev: ..... eh ok

O2: *approved*

... true visionary, well done to everyone involved.

Me: So, I've been looking through the code and there's barely any comments and documentation. What's up with that?

Him: Yeah, it's really complex and low level, so it's difficult to actually describe what it does.

Me: But that's exactly why you should document it! 🤦🤦🤦

Him: ...

Always deliver the goods.

Even if who you work for are idiots, and the product is useless. You never know who will see what you've done.

- I did a six-month underpaid project for ShittyCompany.

- Strived to write it nice and clean with unit tests and good(barely) documentation.

- Got a call up a year later from a consultancy company who integrated with the application I wrote. Now I work for them, and it's as close to my dream job as I could hope for.

Every step of this project has added another six hurdles. I thought it would be easy, and estimated it at two days to give myself a day off. But instead it's ridiculous. I'm also feeling burned out, depressed (work stress, etc.), and exhausted since I'm taking care of a 3 week old. It has not been fun. :<

I've been trying to get the Google Sheets API working (in Ruby). It's for a shared sales/tracking spreadsheet between two companies.

The documentation for it is almost entirely for Python and Java. The Ruby "quickstart" sample code works, but it's only for 3-legged auth (meaning user auth), but I need it for 2-legged auth (server auth with non-expiring credentials). Took awhile to figure out that variant even existed.

After a bit of digging, I discovered I needed to create a service account. This isn't the most straightforward thing, and setting it up honestly reminds me of setting up AWS, just with less risk of suddenly and surprisingly becoming a broke hobo by selecting confusing option #27 instead of #88.

I set up a new google project, tied it to my company's account (I think?), and then set up a service account for it, with probably the right permissions.

After downloading its creds, figuring out how to actually use them took another few hours. Did I mention there's no Ruby documentation for this? There's plenty of Python and Java example code, but since they use very different implementations, it's almost pointless to read them. At best they give me a vague idea of what my next step might be.

I ended up reading through the code of google's auth gem instead because I couldn't find anything useful online. Maybe it's actually there and the past several days have been one of those weeks where nothing ever works? idk :/

But anyway. I read through their code, and while it's actually not awful, it has some odd organization and a few very peculiar param names. Figuring out what data to pass, and how said data gets used requires some file-hopping. e.g. `json_data_io` wants a file handle, not the data itself. This is going to cause me headaches later since the data will be in the database, not the filesystem. I guess I can write a monkeypatch? or fork their gem? :/

But I digress. I finally manged to set everything up, fix the bugs with my code, and I'm ready to see what `service.create_spreadsheet()` returns. (now that it has positively valid and correctly-implemented authentication! Finally! Woo!)

I open the console... set up the auth... and give it a try.

... six seconds pass ...

... another two seconds pass ...

... annnd I get a lovely "unauthorized" response.

asjdlkagjdsk.

> Pic related.

[Microsoft documentation]

* click here to know more about ShitException *click it*

* discover the new Surface Pro, click for purchase..

what the shit !!

it's funny, how doing something for ages but technically kinda the wrong way, makes you hate that thing with a fucking passion.

In my case I am talking about documentation.

At my study, it was required to write documentation for every project, which is actually quite logical. But, although I am find with some documentation/project and architecture design, they went to the fucking limit with this shit.

Just an example of what we had to write every time again (YES FOR EVERY MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT) and how many pages it would approximately cost (of custom content, yes we all had templates):

Phase 1 - Application design (before doing any programming at all):
- PvA (general plan for how to do the project, from who was participating to the way of reporting to your clients and so on - pages: 7-10.
- Functional design, well, the application design in an understandeable way. We were also required to design interfaces. (Yes, I am a backender, can only grasp the basics of GIMP and don't care about doing frontend) - pages: 20-30.
- Technical design (including DB scheme, class diagrams and so fucking on), it explains it mostly I think so - pages: 20-40.

Phase 2 - 'Writing' the application
- Well, writing the application of course.
- Test Plan (so yeah no actual fucking cases yet, just how you fucking plan to test it, what tools you need and so on. Needed? Yes. but not as redicilous as this) - pages: 7-10.

- Test cases: as many functions (read, every button click etc is a 'function') as you have - pages: one excel sheet, usually at least about 20 test cases.

Phase 3 - Application Implementation
- Implementation plan, describes what resources will be needed and so on (yes, I actually had to write down 'keyboard' a few times, like what the actual motherfucking fuck) - pages: 7-10.
- Acceptation test plan, (the plan and the actual tests so two files of which one is an excel/libreoffice calc file) - pages: 7-10.
- Implementation evalutation, well, an evaluation. Usually about 7-10 FUCKING pages long as well (!?!?!?!)

Phase 4 - Maintaining/managing of the application
- Management/maintainence document - well, every FUCKING rule. Usually 10-20 pages.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement) - 20-30 pages.
- Content Management Plan - explains itself, same as above so 20-30 pages (yes, what the fuck).
- Archiving Document, aka, how are you going to archive shit. - pages: 10-15.

I am still can't grasp why they were surprised that students lost all motivation after realizing they'd have to spend about 1-2 weeks BEFORE being allowed to write a single line of code!

Calculation (which takes the worst case scenario aka the most pages possible mostly) comes to about 230 pages. Keep in mind that some pages will be screenshots etc as well but a lot are full-text.

Yes, I understand that documentation is needed but in the way we had to do it, sorry but that's just not how you motivate students to work for their study!

Hell, students who wrote the entire project in one night which worked perfectly with even easter eggs and so on sometimes even got bad grades BECAUSE THEIR DOCUMENTATION WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH.

For comparison, at my last internship I had to write documentation for the REST API I was writing. Three pages, providing enough for the person who had to, to work with it! YES THREE PAGES FOR THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT.

This is why I FUCKING HATE the word 'documentation'.

the official Android documentation says it stands for "What a Terrible Failure"...sure it does Google, sure it does....

My output of 5 hours of work: changing a 'b' to a 'B'.

5 hours working out what the stupid cryptic error message means and reading documentation, 5 minutes to change and test the difference.

Who encodes a whole gif inside the main CSS of a multifolder JS app without any documentation as to what it is? My university, that's who.

Usually I do love my colleagues, but lately....

FOR FUCKS SAKE I AM NOT YOUR WALKING HUMAN GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE SHITOVERFLOW CHATGEPETTO INSTANCE! READ YOUR FUCKING LOGS, DO A FUCKING INFORMATION LOOKUP, READ THE FUCKING MANUAL.

OH YOU HAVE A QUESTION YOU SAY? PLEASE FOR FUCK SAKE ELABORATE WITH SOMETHING MORE THEN 'Please help me with the pipeline"' WHILE YOUR ACTUAL PROBLEM IS A LACK OF KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING OF GIT, LINUX OPERATING SYSTEMS AND AUTOMATION.

OH YOUR BRANCH IS, WHAT, 3 MONTHS BEHIND MASTER? NEVER HEARD OF A FUCKING REBASE? WHATS THAT YOU SAY??? YOU DONT KNOW WHEN TO SKIP A COMMIT??? ITS YOUR FUCKING CODEBASE! READ THE FUCKING DOCUMENTATION !!!

WHATS THAT? YOU WORK IN VSCODE AND YOU DO T K OW HOW? AGAIN READ THE FUCKING DOCUMENTATION !

Self.end(rant)

Just spoke with another teams developer. (She's using Java)

Her: so we get a json object from your service, I want an array
Me: well that's not what you said in the specs... And it's not hard since it's just a Map
Her: what Map? It's JSonObject I need an Array
Me: give me the library your using..
Her: here...

I Google the documentation and methods and paste the link and the methods to use:

-length (she also wanted count)
-toJsonArray

This ain't JS, just use the . operator and go thru all the methods' docs... Or learn to use Google

Kid: How do you know what to use in a script?
Me: I've either used it before or look at documentation.
Kid: You're silly, I bet I know who knows everything and can tell you what the answers are!
Me: Oh? Who's that, the code creator?
Kid: Mistah Google behind my browser! Just ask him and he tells you everything he knows!

The little shit will be going places...

FUCKING TELEGRAM FUCK YOU STAY IN YOUR FUCKING API DOCUMENTATION AND STOP FUCKING TESTING YOUR SHIT ON A PRODUCTION SYSTEM WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT FUCK OFF WHY AM I EVEN DEVELOPING SHIT FOR YOUR PLATFORM ANYMORE WHEN FOLLOWING YOUR DOCUMENTATION LEADS TO FUCKING ERRORS AND WE HAVE TO DECOMPILE AND REVERSE ENGINEER YOUR FUCKING "OPEN SOURCE" APPS BECAUSE YOU DONT EVEN BOTHER TO FUCKING UPDATE THE SOURCE CODE ONCE A YEAR WHAT THE FUCK

Thank you for your attention

Me: "What a stupid piece of shit documentation and software, it does not work!!!!!!!"

Also me: "Oh, this typo made everything _not-work_"

Published a well documented and tested API with project examples for basic use cases

- "Yeah we didn't use yours because we didn't know how to use it"
- "Did you look at the documentation or code examples?"
- "What where?"
- "In the repo you just cloned"
- "Yeah no <random guy> found a hacky way of doing what we want, his thing just works"
- "I..."

“In order to release on production you merge on production”

Makes sense.

“In order to release on staging you merge on release”

Wait, what?

“The CI for the staging release is called release to production”

What? No, stop!

“You also need to create a tag called pre-production-deployment, so that staging can work”

STOP FFS

“It’s very easy, you just need to read the documentation!”

How do people do not realise they are spitting out bs?

Fuck software assurance.

Fuck functional specifications, fuck software requirements, fuck V-model bullshit documentation, fuck integration test plans.

Fuck trying to shoehorn waterfall requirements into what clearly was an interative development.

Fuck me for being a single dev handling all this bullshit by myself.

The superhuman feeling of going back to your code after a week and it all makes perfect sense, the variable names are intuitive, the doc strings are comprehensive, and the general codebase structure is sensible.

Being naive enough to assume I would have time to come back and "fix that later" - oh and also that I would still know exactly what "that" was and how my own code worked with zero documentation.

Two new coworkers step in. HR hasn't set up their accounts yet. We create all necessary tickets and wait. A week has now gone by. New guys are just sitting there reading documentation. Call HR

- We are currently processing the request.
- But what is taking so long?
- The request needs to be approved in 4 steps by people on higher and higher levels.
- What level is it currently on?
- Two

*Rage quit*

Yesterday I had to ask a classmate what the arguments of a method were (no documentation).

He said: "Uhmm it doesn't matter in which order you put the arguments into the method?"

No more to say.

Unspoken rule @ my work: if anyone asks if there is any specification and/or documentation available, they owe beer to everyone in hearsight... So there was a time we got around 5 new hires in a period of 2 days and guess what?! After a day or two it was a real problem to stay sober for the rest of the week. // Yes, some of them did not learn the first time 😂😂😂

Talked with my boss about documentation for projects in markdown instead of (shiver) MS Word. My boss laughed after I explained what mark down was and said that she did not want a world where we had to edit text files all day.

Wait? What do you think programming is?!?

Also Word is basically a text file with tons of proprietary bloated junk on top. Any “feature” it has is not needed.

I got selected for a dev job at a bank and I received a form on email to fill up and come with the hard copy to do the documentation etc.
HR girl: I can't understand what you wrote in the form.
Me: Yeah, I don't usually write things these days with a pen.
HR: So when was the last time you actually wrote anything.
Me: I think it was at a bank. I filled a form.
HR: Nice one!
Me: Oh!

Skipping unit tests and documentation ...

I'm starting to recover after not writing a single test for the first 6 years of my professional carrer (wasn't taught in school, didn't know where to start, man I should have really found a mentor earlier), and barely any documentation (I was the sole developer for several years, and just didn't get into the habbit).

Unit testing is still not a habit, but now I have the first tests to serve as an example and an idea what/how to test at least, and I try to get every new "framework" function/class at least commented properly.

Wish me luck

Got a new eval board. It came in with a stock firmware, had its own IP and naturally its own webGUI. I wanted to check what was under the hood. So I SSH'd in to the device, and was prompted to enter the username. There weren't any specs or documentation.

*Hmm, let's try root*
User: root
Password: *Eh? Well, what the heck* admin
.
.
.
root@evalboard#

Muhahaha!!! Meet your hacker, eval board!

So I was reviewing my old code. Refactoring and improving the documentation.

This is a production app that is being used 24/7/365.

I see myself using "bar = foo" and there's even an explanation of what it does.
Apparently I resolved a relatively difficult Date object issue and had to use temporary variables.
Didn't know how to call them and ended up with these jewels.

I am 30.

Just now I see that if I rewrite documentation of things I learn online with my own words (aka taking fucking notes) I learn with 5x quality.

For some reason I didn't do this most of my 20s.

what the fuck am I doing with my life?

Me: 'alriiight let's run this code here'

Logs: 'lol the function you did is deprecated. how about you don't do that, and do the right thing instead'

What was the right thing?
I don't know. It's not on their documentation in their site.

Thanks, js devs :) you guys are the absolute best

This is documentation at a noob-program level. We had this one teacher, who shall remain unnamed, who used single letter variable names everywhere, who couldn't understand his own programs when they were shown to him.
PS - The picture attached is supposed to be an implementation of Kruskal's algorithm. Don't ask me what the variables mean.

Stupid apple documentation. can't even give a damn example. I have to go to Microsoft documention to get example on a framework made by apple. What a joke.

I’m a team lead in the tech team, myself and another team lead manage the on call processes for the department, so when stuff breaks we need to fix it. I assume there is sufficient documentation available for me to fix a process that is not mine.

one of the other managers processes breaks. He’s on annual leave and is away for another week. I attempt to fix the process. No documentation. What do i do?

I go to my manager the next day and tell her the process is broken and I can’t fix it because there’s no documentation and I don’t know what the full impacts are. She agreed we should leave it until he comes back from AL.

He comes back a week later. I tell him the process is broken and it’s been failing since he went on AL.

Him: we had a handover before I went on holiday
Me: no, you showed me where the ‘documentation’ was. Said documentation is not defined enough and is out of date. I didn’t want to break it further by trying to repair it when it’s not completely critical
Him: but it is critical, it has to run every day
Me: so why doesn’t it say that in the documentation?
Him: ............
Me: can you fix it please
Him: no, I’ve got too much to do having just come back from holiday
Me: more critical that a process that has to run EVERY DAY and has been failing for the past 10 DAYS??
Him: I’ll see if I have time

2 hours later...

Him: Lets put in some time for handover so you can understand the process. Is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, you tell me, it’s your process, you know what’s involved and how long it should take to explain
Him: well is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, it takes however long it takes you to explain it
Him: I’m asking you
...........

At this point I’m getting more and more angry, how can you not know how long your process is gonna take to explain when you’re the one that wrote it?! I fully well know that it’s gonna take longer than an hour because it’s an SSIS package that looks like a plate of spaghetti, you spend 15 minutes working out what box flows to where before even looking at any SQL, and he’s still asking me how long it’s gonna take and distracting me from my ACTUAL critical work

Man is a waste of space, so quick to give you work that isn’t his but never takes responsibility for his own... honestly have no clue whatsoever how he became a manager....

This rant doesn’t seem like much reading it back but I swear it’s the last in a looooonnngggg like of his fuck ups that other people have had to deal with 🙄🙄

The company I am currently working for is partnering with another startup. Nothing special about that. We should integrate their API into our system. I wasn't involved in the process when it came to checking there API and if it would work with our Systems. The Person who did that already left the company so I was left behind with some internal documentation. In that Documentation is already written that API is basically trash....

After I started integrating the API I found more and more flaws in the design. They are not sending any responses that would help, when a param is missing or the authentication isn't correct, only 500's . I got some documentation from the partner company so i thought it will be fine as long as the Documentation would be accurate. Turns out the documentation isn't even close to be up to date. Wrong content types wrong endpoints, wrong naming. Basically we could not work with that. We shortly contacted the partner Company. After a few WEEKS we got a response that they updated the Documentation what was right but still not everything was correct. At this point I lost my mind. I researched a little bit about them, the company is founded from 2 young people who basically came strait out of the University and doest have any experience or idea how to build an API. I investigated a little bit there websites.

They have an Admin panel on the base domain from their API but it is only accessible via HTTP. Like WTF , They use HTTP for an Admin Panel this must be a joke right?

They use Cloudflare without a HTTP to HTTPS redirection ???

I really had not that much time to research in there website but if I find these things in 5 minutes I don't want to know what I can find in like an hour.

At the end we will still use them as partners because surprise surprise our company already sold the product that uses their API.

I know that I will be the person who has to help fixing this shit when it breaks and it will break 1000% JUST FUCK THIS SHIT. FUCK THE PARTNER COMPANY. FUCK THERE API.

Ok so I've been working on this bug for the past four days, fucking non-stop. I wanted to fucking die, was wishing I could just "pkill -f mylife". I tried fucking everything, did what the documentation told me to, stack overflow, tried different versions of the API, read through more lines of documentation than lines in the bible, to no avail. Start comparing screenshots of error logs from the past four days, notice that I started getting a line saying that it's connecting to the config file in a different location from default. I realize that the config file does not match the config file provided by the package installed, so I switch it to the default location. IT FUCKING WORKED, I've tested it nearly 10 times now and I am still in disbelief. It was a rollercoaster of emotions fixing the bug but now I'm just smiling like a fool in my chair at work now.

I am using this SDK and I came across a property "Orientation" of type int.

Why int? Is it an enum or something? Let's have a look into the online documentation...

"Gets or sets the orientation."
😣

Yeah, thanks. Very useful.
It's again that kind of documentation which simply restates the property name or method name. Who needs this?

So I tried to set the Orientation property to 1 to see what happens.

A runtime exception then told me that the only valid values are 0, 90, 180 and 270.

Well, this is kind of stupid but ok, I can live with that.
But ffs, put that info into the documentation, where it belongs!

Dear person who extended my <T> to <Type> in the documentation:

Fuck you! Everybody knows what the T stands for! Don't mess with my stuff, don't go against my ethics and most of all, don't even dare to talk back on me unless you want me to return the favour and extand that assgole of yours with a cactus

That's what I call a good documentation. Not boring to read!

I'm gonna decline the next time someone asks me "hop in chat with them" to discuss their stackoverflow problem.

I'd already given my two cents about the problem in question and I thought something was unclear about that so I say okay what the hell, made a chat room and invited him in.

Him: So I have this OTHER problem with [insert JS plugin]
Me: ... I don't know enough about it. I've used that specific plugin maybe once. The question I offered you my help with was PHP.
Him: Yeah but can you take a look really quick?
Me: I'd have to reread the documentation. I literally don't remember how to use it.
Him: No problem, here's the documentation. I want to do X, Y and Z.
Me: I don't think you can X without doing A and B first.
Him: I was told not to do A, so how can I do X, Y and Z?

Fucking hell I'm not gonna do your job for you. You know english. There is documentation available. Just read it and at least try things.

No documentation. Thousands of lines of code. Still learn enough about the solution to make a required change in a day. Now the company feels like I should be the one to lead training for the module, and I still don't know what the other half of the code does. T-minus two hours...

Both apps I'm working on have legacy code:

iOS app has 100's and 1000's of lines of code with no documentation, no proper naming conventions and cut and pasted code off the net.

Android app has skeleton code from a Spanish taxi app + remnants of a funeral webcasting app, there's also the same no documentation, bad naming conventions and cut and paste code off the net.

The server is also as bad, it had methods that we're never used, I for one don't fully understand the server but from what I can see it's a mess.

I had a hard time understanding both apps and gladly majority of the modifications I made we're not including existing stuff, so I guess I just basically pilled my code onto of the already existing software.

I would have gladly started from scratch given the chance.

Holy fuck is learning new frameworks frustrating.

I'm trying to setup a simple fucking flutter app and all their tutorials are basic shit with no auth/complex routing.

Any feature of flutter that's not in a tutorial has absolute shit documentation with 0 examples on how to use it.

Material app has like 20 properties and if you click on something like on generate there is shit for knowing what the fuck it's expecting.

Stackoverflow has a ton a code but that's just it, code. I have absolutely no idea how they generate the code they have from the documentation on the site. They must have been following flutter from the start.

Ahhhhh! 😠

You know what is disappointing?
When you struggle with something and then you discover that the solution was clearly stated in the documentation.
In short, I'm an idiot. But I still got one upvote on my question on stackoverflow so apparently I'm not the only idiot out there. Arigato, idiot-tachi, we need to stand together so we can fail together.

"Developer code must ensure that IAsyncDisposable implementations don't take a long time to complete."

Ah yes, the very technical "long time" unit of measurement. God why don't you just go fuck yourself microsoft

Android development:
- read the official documentation
- implement the logic in your app using what you learned
- find out that at least one method is always deprecated
- read the updated API and, as always, check out your loyal friend Stack Overflow.

For god fucking sake, PulseAudio, write a usable fucking documentation for your library and remove idiotic silent exit(1) calls and properly log what the fucking issue was

I'm tired of debugging this piece of bull shit for over a month now already while the pulse library occasionally crashes for no apparent reason

Amazing API's and SEX!

Alright people, now that I've got your attention, I'm getting to the point where I need to plan and roll out a solid API for a project. So after reading a lot of the horror stories written here, What are the finer points of what makes an amazing API experience to use and integrate with over a poor one?
And don't say documentation (If you do explain why) 😁

Dynamically typed languages suck. God I hate them

It's like one big clunky free for all. I don't understand how people can work in Python or even JavaScript and tell me that they're good languages with a straight face

Not having proper autocomplete or documentation (a somewhat seperate issue of Python) is a kick in the stomach for productivity.
I've seen people advocate for using EXTERNAL DOCUMENTATION VIEWERS. WHAT

I hate not being able to enforce types so I can reason about little parts of my program. I hate not having an IDE that can actually help me. I hate having to see stupid grep'ed code snippets instead of nicely formatted javadocs. I hate having to double and triple check everything when trying to code. I hate handling effectively opaque values where I don't know anything about the type without looking it up. And I especially hate not knowing what types function parameters need to be.

Dynamic typing doesn't remove types. That, although completely unfeasible, I could respect.
Oh no, the types are still there. Just not for you

It's like solving a jigsaw puzzle with a blindfold on

Why does node-sass have such garbage documentation?!
I've now spent over an hour trying to get a clear and concise answer to how that shit works, and what do I get? This: (see picture)

I don't know what any of that means, nor do they care to tell me.
I don't want to render this shit at runtime, I want it to compile the sass code when I make changes to it so my app doesn't get boggled down by unnecessary background processes.
But nooo of course not.
To top it off, the "easy" electron-compile solution doesn't even fucking compile because all its dependencies are either outdated or 404 on me. 😡

It's shit like this that makes me hate web-style development. Lacking documentation and people who just assume everything is logical and clear from the start. It's fucking not.

I have a lab at uni where my lab group have to refactor some code from an open source project. We got assigned some Apache project and jfc that code is a mess. Little to no documentation, hard to navigate, tests that you have no idea what it's testing, and so on. On top of that the teacher expects us to spend more time than we have on it. I'll be glad when this course is over :))

"Your documentation doesn't specify what should be returned if there is no item matching the id, so currently I'm just gonna have it throw a 504"

Why on earth would you? What's wrong with you, you sick bastard?

Android is gonna be the death of me. Any fucking idea you have is impossible to implement, because libraries with clear documentation are deprecated. If a library is not deprecated, however, it has documentation written by a fucking caveman who thinks it's extremely self explanatory on how to use something that is extremely application specific. Spent hours looking at Google example code that crashes almost immediately after execution, what a joke.

tldr:
first year in college we programmed 24 hrs straight to fix somebody's mess before the deadline. Decided not to screw him over, instead he claimed to have done everything and we failed the assignment.

Long version:
var group= new[]{"Mike", "Gavin", "Gus", "I", "Ben" };
var client = "Jack"';

First year of college we had an assignment to make a web program for somebody.
Ben wanted to join our group and he already knew a client so we let him join.

After joining Ben wanted to be project lead, but we already decided Mike based on his experience.
Ben claimed to be much better in every way than Mike at and kept coming with stuff the following weeks why we should make him project lead. He kept pointing out when Mike did something wrong and he even came with an audio file where he clearly made jack say that he wanted Ben to be project lead .
After that we were all a bit pissed and told him that he should get it in his head that he was not going to be project lead and just start working on his part of the assignment.

We also found out that Ben was a documentation addict, what we could write in a small paragraph, he wrote a whole page about it. No joke, I rewrote a page of his in 5-6 rows with the same information in it.
No problem you thing, wrong! Because of this he kept bothering us arguing and claiming that our documentation was wrong because it was to short.

In the week of the deadline we asked Ben if he was also done, and told us that he was done for a while now.

The day before the deadline we came to school thinking we only had to do some merging and finishing up documentation.
Then we found out that Ben has almost nothing, and what he had the IDE was screaming that it was incorrect, spaces in Id's and css class names for instance. A really good programmer, my ass!
We were so pissed off at this point, but we had 24 hrs and needed to come up with a plan to fix it.

We decided that Mike and I were going to fix Ben his shit in the coming 24 hrs and Ben was going to make our last bit of documentation because we would not have the time for that, Especially if we had to argue with him like we had to do for each bit of documentation. Gus did not have time and Gavin could not program on his own yet, he wanted to help, but helping him help us would cost more time than we had.

We all went home after that and Mike and I started to program 24 hours straight while in a Skype call, making what Ben had 2 months for. Shortly before the deadline Mike looked at our finishing up documentation received from Ben and told me it was "Okay" and zipped everything up and uploaded it to school with a few minutes to spare.

After that we thought everything was good, we made Ben's part work and delivered it in time. We also decided not to throw Ben under the bus, because this would hurt all our grades because we did not work good as a group since we should have noticed it earlier.

A few weeks go by till the assessment.
The assessment start with asking if we want individual grades or as a group when you all think you did equal amount. We choose as a group, because if we chose individual not only Ben but also Gavin would get a lower grade and we did not think that was fair because he tried so hard.

We demo the product and the teachers are positive. When the teachers start about the documentation, the first thing they tell is that they found something interesting in the documentation, and they read it to us:

"I, Ben, have made all the documentation because my group did not want to."

That was so far from the truth, we all did make our documentation about the parts we made. Yes he did do overall a little bit more because every single bit of documentation we had to argue with him, so every time he volunteers to make it, we would all agree. And he made Mike's and i's last bit of documentation.

Telling the teachers on that point would not have mattered, it would only have hurt is in another way, so we did not and all failed the assignment. And we all felt like to strangle him.
This is now a few years back, but i still want too.

As a freelancer I get side requests from bigger development companies from time to time that don't have the time or capacity to deal with it themselves.

So usually the employees are pretty friendly but they do not like to read any of the documentation I send with the code. They call me up with stupid questions that are usually answered in the documentation.

I had sent them everything they had requested last Thursday so they called me on Friday to ask the usual stupid question. However, this time I had beforehand decided to have some fun! I told them I had to leave for the weekend and to call me back on Monday. Of course they called me during the weekend, but I didn't answer. So they called me today.

What I had done before handing it all in was I had named the methods that I wrote illogically, while stating and explaining the whole situation in the documentation extra clearly.

So I answered the call today and the first thing they did was apologize. Since I didn't answer their calls during the weekend they finally realized that the best way to go is reading the documentation instead of calling me all the time. They were freaked out at first because they thought there was something completely wrong with the code and they had to tell their client that the deadline had to be pushed back.

We are all good now :)

What software documentation tool you are using?

Fuck you apple, and fuck your god damn shitty documentation.

Working with NFC enabled passes, their documentation says "payload max is 64 bytes"

What they ACTUALLY fucking mean is 64 ascii characters.

Also, the way they handle date time formats is fucked. They say they support W3C formats (iso) but what they actually mean is, they support a half assed version of a subset of it.

I told their chief engineer over a phone call and his response;

"I agree, our documentation is lacking"... HOW ABOUT YOU FUCKING UPDATE IT!

Also, how they handle json is just bad.

Mentors, take note. This is a best practice over here.

I've spent two days digging through obscure documentation trying to accomplish one of those tasks that is simple in word and complex in deed. Namely, I wanted to concatenate (not delete) near-duplicate values in Pandas before rendering the data into a graph. Two days beating my head against the wall.

One of my mentors (I'm an intern) heard about the issue, wrote in the proper line (a very specifically and archaically formatted command), and pushed it to repo without even asking for thanks. Works like a charm and he saved my rear end. What a guy.

Please, mentors, don't leave your interns hanging on problems where the only solution is shrouded in dubious documentation and magic syntax. Especially when there's a deadline involved. Let them struggle on logic flow and writing good code.

Be like this guy. You'll build the importance of teamwork and your intern will think you're a wizard.

What I have: [a, b, c]
What I need: [[a],[b],[c]]
No documentation
Just numpy things ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Is it so hard to comment your code?

I work on collab projects here and there and both the comments and documentation are both awful, nearly always, there are some exceptions.

This is a plea to all those who teach anyone to program. "This performs a loop" is not a helpful comment, nor is "This sets variable x to 1" where the line below is "let x = 1".

The last piece of code brings me on to my next point meaningful variable names. If x is a variable that stores the age of a machine call it ageOfMachine or age_of_machine. Not aom, not x but what it actually is, modern IDEs and text editors will fill this out for you.

Finally documentation, a good friend of mine sent me this quote a while back, I can't find the image but "Documentation is like sex, when it's good, it's great. But when it's bad it's better than nothing." Your documentation should be good, a good pattern to follow is the Node.js documentation, it tells the function, what it does and what parameters it takes.

Anyway rant over; and I'm sure that this applies to people outside of this community only.

Dear providers of SDKs, when you claim to have a full documentation for your SDK, please at least provide the info about what unit (radians or degrees) the Angle properties are. Especially important when the iOS SDK is taking radians and the Android SDK is taking degrees, as I found out by experimenting. I don't even care so much about float on Android and double on iOS. Just make use of the fucking documentation and provide some actually useful info there. "Sets or gets the angle" is fucking NOT useful.

Client: "documentation, oh you mean those grey texts the previous code guy wrote on the code files"

Me: I kinda need more than "grey texts on the code files" if you want me to actually fix the system and implement the new specs.

Client: oh you mean the Microsoft asp books

Me: It's a Laravel system sir, it's php not asp.net

Client: what are those?

Me:.................

Submitting a pull request seems a good way to end the week. That's what I love about (some) projects on GitHub; instead of just ranting about bugs or out-of-sync documentation, you can fix the problem and send a pull request upstream. :-)

Person: I need documentation for your program.
Me: Program isn't done yet.
Person: We want it anyways.
Me: Everything I document in dev will be drastically different once it's completed.
Person: Yes, we want documentation of what doesn't work so we can refer to it later for help.

Raise, zero releases on weekend, not mentioning for once that ChatGPT/Bard said this or that ...etc

I swear once ChatGPT gave my boss the exact opposite of what is mentioned in the documentation and I had to literally share the link of the docs so that boss believe me ...

You know what is a nice phrase to write in your documentation right before you leave the job?

"I leave this to the evaluation and practice of the reader."

Such a delight to write that down.

FUCKING SHITTY PHP WITH NO FUCKING COMMENTS AND A JOKE OF A DOCUMENTATION WELL I DON'T FUCKING KNOW WHY THAT BUGS HAPPENING NONE OF THIS CODE MAKES SENSE AND IT APPEARS TO BE HELD TOGETHER BY DUCT TAPE AND PRAYERS AND IM GONNA LOSE MY MIND IF I SEE ONE MORE FUCKING 200 LINE FUNCTION WITH A NAME LIKE 'transformData' WHAT THE HOLY FUCK DOES IT DO I SWEAR TO GOD THIS CODEBASE NEEDS TO BE FIREBOMBED

Fucking piece of shit, i want to make a fairly thin app with some native functionality and

Flutter - no documentation whatsoever, what a surprise
React native - i need 3 extra modules just to do what i want
Cordova - fuck no
Litho - seems fine but i dont wanna use native, i dont even have adb on my laptop

18 commits later, the unofficial documentation has been ported over to GitBook.

The documentation now lives in a private repo on GitHub which is hooked up to a CI tool to build the book when a commit is pushed.

This will make maintaining the documentation much easier and also allow for collaboration which was previously not possible.

Because this documentation contains some endpoints some of you might not even know about, access is provided on a invite-only basis which is controlled by @dfox.

For new requests, contact @dfox with your name and what you are planning to build.

If you have already created something with the API email me at support@nblackburn.uk with your name and a link and I will send you a invite.

!Rant

TLDR: What's your favorite REST API Documentation tool?

I'm about to start developing a really large REST API. I have never really had need to document my previous API's since they were small, self explanatory and had only me using them. Aside from this one being too large for me to keep track of there is also a remote team that will need to integrate with it.

Basically I need write exceptional documentation while using as little time as possible. I love postman and am planning to use it for documentation since I currently use it to test during development anyway but I have seen some really neat looking tools like swagger and apiary so I figured I would check for some other suggestions.

What is your current / preferred REST API documentation method?

If hiring managers really want to hire based on skill, what they should be doing is testing for one thing:

The ability to take a specification, written in general language, notice deficiency, communicate with the 'client' (manager) to hash out what needs done, and the (explicit) ability to read documentation on libraries or tooling outside the dev's core skillset.

If a dev can read a spec, talk to a client to work out whats lacking, and then identify what they need to know and where to find it, thats 90% of the skills they need from what I can see.

tl;dr version of it, is they should be explicit about the requirements for reading/implementing specs and finding the correct documentation.
Something along the lines of
"can you form your letters? Are you able to follow instructions on the back of a cake box? Then there may be a position waiting for you!"

So I handed in my official resignation last week as I will be changing to a new job next month. So one of the last big things that I have been working on is a Jenkins server for the rest of the team to use and currently writing up the documentation for it.

However I haven't been told who I will be handing over my work to, but the bigger thing I feel is that even if I write all the documentation, no one will actually read it. Reason I think this is because I doubt anyone else in the team will even use the Jenkins server. The major issues are that no one writes unit tests and don't even understand what CI is!

So right now it feels like my final month of work will all be for nothing and makes me wonder if I should even bother writing documentation, especially if it isn't going to be handed over to anyone.

link to unrelated documentation is accepted answer on stackoverflow

fuck you

What is it about SQL that invites people to do things in utterly ridiculous ways? The amount of pointless repetition and complete lack of clarity in the query scripts I get handed is irritating at the best of times - without any documentation (or even a bare comment sometimes) how am I supposed to work out what you were doing?

Dear Microsoft power bi team.
Go fuck yourself. Put that dashboard up your ass. The documentation for this is a joke.

The doc says I can get my tokens from azure portal. But guess what. The portal is a sea. And seems like powerbi is moved out from portal to its own powerbi.fuckyoumicrosoft.com

What the actual fuck you dimwits. Why don't you document it properly ?
For fuck sake. Go show up your analytics deep into your pie chart.

Serious question for anybody who has dared to understand manager-speak: Do you know what a 'Task Rewind' is? We have it in our documentation, but google gives me no help as to what the hell it could mean.

...Or should I just take my original gut feeling and classify this as yet another word for the clown dictionaries?

Can't get over how many big companies get away with poor/no documentation for their own APIs. The past week i have been working with a large insurance company that only via email threads explained what endpoint to send files to and what username I could use to get this to work.

I also worked with a major courier service last month that only had a two page document for all their methods and one of the pages was explaining the transportation of data via imagery haha.

>"We need this project finished for tomorrow"
<"But we don't even know what the client wants for parts X, Y and Z"
I'm currently in a sinking ship of a company that has no proper project management or documentation. Requirements mutate with the lead manager's biorhythms and all projects are delayed because he's incapable of scouting or retaining talent.
Unless I've misread their financial situation, I don't think they'll stay in business throughout the year without some major restructuring.

fuck u aws

all that money and u can't read idiot proof documentation for me to have SQS connect to a VPC endpoint to read a message

also fuck u search algorithms for not handing me an easy bake solution to what is a not a novel situation

also fuck me for being unable to git gud

Wow, very technical and clear documentation:

"While we do not publish the symbol limits for the streaming API, we do monitor for abuse to make sure people aren’t doing anything egregious. Essentially, ask for what you need. Don’t abuse the APIs and you should be fine."

...and, we all know what 'fine' stands for, right?

🤡

After drilling yourself with links and resources, documentation and cant execute what you want. You leave it.

Some time later you go back and you are like why the hell didnt I understand this it's so simple :/ and it literally says what to do.

This is when I became a calm developer. Don't rush yourself. If you want to quickly do something. READ dont just look 🙃

Also, don't persist with understand the official docs. The third party explanations will show you flames 80% of the times if you are learning something new.

Last Week Friday:
PM: We'll be taking you off the one project on to another, we'll send the details later.
Me: Cool

*Hours Later*

PM: Ok cool, so you'll be looking at a script that one of our Pillar heads has scripted. You need to make sure it works and that it can run on the server.
Me: *I always thought this guy was useless now i get to see what he can do* Cool, just send the documentation and i'll take a look at it over the weekend. Just tell me when you've sent it.
PM: Cool.
Project Head: I'll inform you when i send the files and how to run them.
Me: *I know how to set up a database locally, i'm not an idiot* Cool.

Whole Weekend I don't get a single message.

Monday Morning:
Project Head(PH): Have you taken a look at it yet?
Me: Taken a look at what?
PH: The Database and the Script
Me: i didn't get any message over the weekend.
PH: I sent it yesterday, it should be in your inbox.
Me: There's Nothing. Sending anything on a Sunday is expecting me not to see it, especially at 10pm. Besides i can't retrieve any of the files in the attachment(Outlook tripping), rather send it in a zip file or upload it to onedrive.

PH sends the link. I get the files, set up the DB, glance at the script.

Me: This is actually interesting.
PH: You know what it does?
Me: My SQL knowledge is below average but i can read and understand it pretty well. So your dynamically copying the database from the server to the warehouse, cool.
It's not going to work though.
PH: Check first.

I check it

Me: Doesn't work, but it sort of works.
PH: What do you mean?
Me: Some tables are populated but some aren't,, how and there's a shit tone of errors.
PH: So i does copy the data over.
Me: Some of the data.
PH: test it on the Server
Me: Not a good idea.
PH: Just try it.
PM: In the mean time i'll send you some documentation i need you to review and edit.
Me: *Idiots* Cool.

Tuesday:
Me: Have you checked it on the server yet?
PH: Not yet, busy.
Me: Where's the documentation again?
PM: I'll send it it a moment.
Me: In the mean time i'll write some script to fix that script that's definitely not going to work.

Wednesday:
Boss: I heard you done with the script
Me: It's not done, but we'll be testing it on the server later.
Boss: Then why are you running it on the server?
Me: Ask the PH and PM.
Boss: What are you doing now?
Me: Well i'm supposed to do documentation *looks at PM* but i haven't recieved any yet, so I've been writing a script to fix the copy script.
PH: Ok we'll test when the boss leaves, after all the meetings.
PM: here's the documentation.
Me: Thanks

I start on documentation.

PH: It didn't work.
Me: I know.
PH: Fix it.

Thursday:
Meeting.
PM: What you doing?
Me: Fixing the script,
PM: Do the documentation first
Me: Cool.

End of the day:
PH: Why you doing the documentation? The script has highest priority.
Me: Ask the PM.

Friday(Today):
Boss: can we talk.
Me: Sure.
Boss: I though you said the script was done?
Me: i said it sort of works, just doesn't do the job 100%.
Boss: Monday i was told it's done.
Me: i only looked through it Monday to understand it, i done nothing before Tuesday. though i have been trying to create a script to fix it.
Boss: Your working really slow hey.
Me: *It's been a week, and stupid people are in charge* I was doing what i was told.
Boss: Cool.(His Upset)

Stupid FUCKEN people, make stupid FUCKEN decisions. But Hey, the boss only see's the final result. I am a human being, even i make mistakes. But there's a huge gap between stupidity and a mistake.

What you're about to read is an horror story based on real facts.
Our story begins one week ago, when a dev who calls himself "Arfmann" (what a loser, the f* means arfmann?) decided to take his dev skills to another level.

He always has been scared of databases. He made really bad dream about them. Like, they were screaming at him "SELECT useUs FROM database" while he was crying in some shared preferences noises.

A week ago, he decided to overcome his fear. He learned the basics of SQL. Everything was going well. Until, he decided to implement it on Flutter. A Google's technology.

At first, he decided to appeal to documentation. Went on Flutter web site. Flutter documentation. Sqflite documentation. Started reading. Started doing tests with the code written by Google's engineer.

Everything was fucked up. Dozens of errors, the documentation started to blow up and his PC went on fire, due to Android Studio.

He used a sample project made by Google's engineer. "Maybe if use directly their code it will work. Maybe I was the problem". He wasn't.

The whole documentation was wrong, every single line of code was a spaghetti code (yes, every single line was an entire spaghetti code). Everything was put in the main. If you wanted to try to keep things organized, you would end up punched and beaten up from the code itself. It would become a sentient entity that will beat you the fuck up.

Really scary.

For the next 2 months, I'm forced to migrate documentation from one site to another, correcting the formating if needed.

What did i do to deserve this?

Documentation? That's the stuff of dreams for us.

Instead we have ancient code written by people who have long left / forgotten with no idea what the cryptic mess they left behind does.

If it weren't for poor documentation I'd be retired by now.

We didn't all write your library. In fact, only you did. So, some helpful documentation would really help us all out. Can't believe the number of times I need to read source code to figure out what the hell you are doing.

dear fucking client, why are you giving me only the "???" as an answer to my well written documentation and explanation about the latest bugfixing.
WHY? What could I possibly get out of this shitty answer? #fml

WooCommerce is shit

Just try to find anything in the documentation on their retarded website and you will get what I am talking about.

A billion of unstructured links. With absolutely no sidebar or table of contents.
IMPOSSIBLE to find any fuck there.
It is far easier to build an e-store from scratch, than to customize their ugly monster.

Now look Laravel or PHPunit documentation to compare how it should be.

Angular material is shit.

Angular material has literally no documentation. There is no search on their shit docs. And there is absolutely no info in their docs about some shit they use.
So when you need to know what the fuck does smth like MatOption mean (what inputs does this piece of fuck takes?) you will need to dig into the code.

As long as there's good documentation, and is relatively speedy, I really don't give a fuck what language/tech I'm using.

You know what pisses me off? When I don't know what a constant is used for so I check the documentation and this is what I see:

Here’s my step-by-step guide for the idiot:

1) take <cutting-egde tech> (Tech)
2) read documentation for Tech
3) figure out what you want to do with Tech
4) if you are being ambitious, simplify the idea appropriately
5) Go do the thing with the Tech
6 When you fail at something, RTFM
7) Rinse and repeat

Just got upset with a coworker due to not understanding the code written, logic, lack of documentation, comments. Nothing!

Other coworker: But Dave, you added that feature last December. Remember?
Me: So what are we working on today?

1) Let me work with devs without me having to explain fundamentals of programming

2) Stop devs from copy pasting code from StackOverflow or any other project without actually understanding what it does

3) Get devs to actually read and understand project documentation FIRST before jumping into any programming work

Remember, the more "cutting edge" and "thousands of clients" a company has is inversely related to the quality of documentation they have on their APIs and software solutions.

I don't give a fuck about your pretty examples, show me which FIELDS can take which VALUES. It's that simple. Instead, I'm wasting your company's and my own time by spamming support for what should be basic questions clearly outlined in the documentation.

What if I told you that algebra, geometry, precalculus's (ect) laws are the equivalent of api/documentation. we learn them and use them when necessary to solve problems. I will use the quadratic formula in math to solve a problem just like I would use a particular function in programming.

Modbus official documentation contains nice layer diagram with texts in Comic Sans?! What year is it? 2000?

This is what I did today in 5 hours and 45 minutes. Documentation and optimized code inside. One method was kinda tricky but I managed to optimize it from 1,88s in the first lazy version to 35ms in the end. Now that's what I call a productive day

Don’t write documentation for other people, write it for yourself! It may all seem obvious today, but six weeks from now you’re not going to remember what you were thinking or why you wrote the code the way you did.

Last year I wrote a sudoku program which did solve easy sudokus but messed up on harder ones. I had got bored after a bit and forgot about it until today I thought I'd rewrite it using new stuff I've learned since and make it work properly.

So I opened it up and look and I'm like 'WHAT!?' because I don't understand what I wrote. After a bit I start to get the idea and see that it was kind of smart even if long and complicated.

If anything, it shows how much my documentation skills have improved.

Now I just have to work out how to redo it in a way I understand.

When I started this job 4 months ago, I was given a grace period of a week to "get into the groove of the code". I asked the lead dev where on pulse (intranet) the documentation was, he laughed and then resumed what he was doing. I shrugged it off and continued scrolling through the code.
A week later, working on a story, I'm stuck at why a particular function exists. I say "it would be nice if there was documentation, where is that anyway?". Lead dev replies, "one thing you should know about this company, there is no documentation unless it's API related".
Last month's retro, 80% of our (mine and lead dev) problems were related to a lack of kt, I laughed.

man this google android documentation fuckin sucks shit

i have NO idea in what order to read the document

they did a great job separating components into each different category but there are a lot of categories that use the knowledge of other categories so all of them are dependent on one another

and even when i read the documentation, they explain it like this in steps:

1. do this
2. do this
3. do this
7. do this
8. do this
45. do this
83. do this
84. do this
85. do this

and for the last step, step 2357 do this

You know that moment, when you look for something on wikipedia, and after few hiperlinks you are reading about influence of penguins on Mars' day length or othen nonsense?

Just happened to me like 4th time when reading Django documentation. It is so well written and easy to understand, that I just click and click and want to go deeper, and then realise I have to read what I need, because I never ever got to it in the first place.

Gotta love the people who make such docs. I never could, and prbly will.

A CS degree is worthless, all my knowledge of modern frameworks comes from YouTube videos, some codeacademy and a little bit of reading the documentation.

I wonder what it feels like to actually learn something completely. I understand something, then I forget it exits until I have to use it again and by then all I remember is how to google the right stuff. Thoughts?

The documentation for the matplotlib python library is terrible for newbies.

There is a "Tutorial" section, but the thing doesn't even explain what you can do until you get to the 4th section!
It starts off with some confusing examples, how to change the appearance and only at section 4 do you actually start to get an introduction to the different components you might want to use...

At some point you finally realize, most of the stuff that is shown can be omitted because the .pyplot module is all you need.

Use Xamarin, they said. It will be easy, they said. You will only need to write your UI once, they said. NOPE
Documentation is shit, I've been sitting here for the past hour and a half figuring out how to add an icon to a button in their shiny XAML thing for which they have NO DOCUMENTATION. THEY WANT YOU TO HOE IT OVER C# BUT THEY ONLY GIVE EXAMPLES IN C#. And now I'm trying to figure out where I can download the iOS UIBarButton icons, because you can't use native icons and fuck apple too, they don't want to give em to you.
What a hellhole.
All while my client is constantly spamming me in all ways, distracting me, marking issues as "supercritical" (which makes an alarm ring on my phone and is only meant for emergencies) and otherwise distracting the living daylight out of asking for screens of the UI.

AND I STILL PREFER IT OVER ANDROID STUDIO. Don't even get me started on that one.

Why is it that every python project I come across seems to not even want you to use it.
The deployment always sucks, you get some random ass errors because some parts are in python 2 instead of 3 I guess. If there's a C library involved it most definitely won't work. What the fuck is conda and why do I need it to install software?
Where is the documentation to build a release yourself if the public ones don't work?

rant¹⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰

WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT SYMFONY DOCUMENTATION. When i'm coding and i'm searching for some info on a function, I DON'T FUCKING WANT A TUTORIAL. I DON'T FUCKING WANT EXAMPLES. I WANT A FUCKING DESCRIPTION OF THAT FUNCTION. WHAT PARAMETERS ARE NEEDED. WHAT CAN I GET IN RETURN. IS IT SO FUCKING HARD TO UNDERSTAND ?

Seriously though, i can't believe actual devs thought this was a good idea. at this point i've been searching for two goddamns hours for a solution to something that should be TRIVIAL, and i'm NOWHERE near a solution. Thanks for my time, Symfony.

Almost..

I am a web developer and assigned in a project as Infrastructure Engineer AND Penetration Tester because no one is available. I survived that hellish experience, i learned clustering and other advance stuff on my own, studying even late at night, no training..just youtube videos. PM (who is currently has little to no involvement in this stage) has very little appreciation in what im doing(research, server estimates, diagramming, documentation, planning)

So, I joined a hardware company as a software developer few months back. I'm working on a c++ code base with thousands of files and no idea what the code is supposed to do.

I got one overview of what the product is supposed to do, which contains mostly electrical engineering jargon that I have no clue about.

Now my manager wants me fix a bug in this code. I have no clue what the expected behaviour is and no documentation whatsoever, and literally no one in the entire country who understands the code.

So I've been writing code for 2 months to implement the GAN for a research paper that I'm writing, and I'm slowly becoming paranoid.

IN THEORY my idea should work. BUT WHAT IF there's some bug in my code that's preventing it from actually doing so. I'm tired of having to wait for days to see some minuscule training improvements...

I swear to god, I'll blame it on the documentation. >D

Say what you want about Microsoft, but I'm working on a WPF app right now and they write some damn good documentation

Why can't the iOS documentation save a cookie to my machine so it can remember what fucking language I want to view it in.

There's no provisioning script. Code repo's there, but no configuration files. Missing folders that break the app. No documentation on what to install, what directories to create, NO instructions. Nothing. Just an empty Ubuntu vagrantbox and a git repo. Took the entire morning and then some, just to replicate the dev environment. Fuck

So third party devs that my employer hired to build our web based application used fucking spaghetti jQuery to validate all of it with no documentation. What a bunch of cunts.

Are you planning on entering politics?

Because your documentation is dishonest, doesn't mention side effects and is not meant to be read humans workout a law degree.
Your code on the other hand makes me question whether you try to troll us or whether you are actually unable to understand what you were supposed to do.

For fuck sake why would you put in documentation some functionalities you did not even develop ?! How am I supposed to guess that my error comes from your code when event the fucking DOCSTRING of the method says the use case is handled ?
It's nice to have documentation and commented code, but could you please make it FUCKING coherent with what the code actually does ? I feel like I'm playing fucking riddles here !!

How fucking hard is it to write simple documentation with everything you need to get something working for fucks sake. Several fucking hours of my life later and I'm still no closer to figuring out what the fuck is going on with something that should simple. FUCK!!

Trying to make an Intellij plugin and coming across and error I don't understand. I google the error(s), find ONE result in English that describes EXACTLY what my issue is, and the answer on StackOverflow just directs me to the documentation with a brief explanation copied directly from someplace, WHICH I WAS USING AND AM STILL HAVING THE ERROR! And it's accepted, too!

By far, the worst docs I've read was for a library I used to use for almost every project. I didn't really have to look at the docs because I knew the ins and outs of it. Time went by and I stopped using the library. I came back to a project that used that library, and I had the hardest time figuring out what was going on.

It was a library I wrote :/

I got much better at documentation after that. I started doing DDD (Document Driven Development) because many developer's first experiences with libraries are with the documentation. It allowed me to interact with my library before I even started development.

Wow that's a new one: a recruiter sent me a "React quizz to check my knowledge on the subject".

Next step would be to send a quizz where the good answers ARE the good answers, because even with the official documentation on the other screen, I get 13/20, which curiously matches with what everyone else got as a result.

Me: "Yeah so I have this problem, I generated an environment and setup a NodeJS docker image on it and it returns "Cannot find public IP address", help"

SO: "Yeah but what are you trying to achieve? Here is a link of the documentation everyone saw and that didn't help at all."

Me: "I just want to... reach the fucking server? Without trouble? Please?"

Some people need some cocaine in they morning coffee, if it can help then open their fucking eyes

When...
- you start the day with good intentions.
- you want to fix some long-due issue
- you think: I'll google it and I'll solve it. What can it be? I just want to track correctly my subdomains with all-mighty Google Analytics

and the first answer you find is:
"Unfortunately, Google Analytics has a few hoops to jump ...blablabla More unfortunately, the Google Analytics documentation is unclear ...blabla"
and 20 more pages of blog.

Fuck.
Let's skip to the next good intention before the day turns bad

Googling for Angular (>=2) documentation and finding AngularJS instead feels like cancer.

If Google was going to "update" to what is functionally a new framework, they should've named it differently instead of trying to piggyback on the popularity of AngularJS. Sure, there's similarities, but let's be realistic here.

Love writing comments, hate writing documentation.

Ugh, I know it is needed but just don't care about it as much as the code/comments which is a more direct 'here is what this does' approach. Writing idiot proof documentation sucks. Any little change? Have to remember to update the docs. Yeah, not happy.

Documentation? What is that?

Reading documentation carefully is cool.
If i did that yesterday i would know that react sees env vars started with REACT_APP_
Instead that i was trying to figure out for 3 hours what is wrong with my docker compose file.
Read documentation

The project with the worst documentation is always my own. I always come back to a project and have no idea what anything does.

What do you recommend to read for Android developement? The SO documentation is not that great for me since I'm just strarting to create some apps?

I actually like writing documentation. It gives me a break in a different pace, gives me time to refocus on what I've built and hopefully make it useful for others as well.

So I made an inquerery for some API documentation..

They escalated the ticket to 2nd level support from what they already called tech support.. why have API integration as a feature then??

Plotly.

What an absolutely powerful library.

With absolute garbage documentation.

what wiki or frameworks are there for writing a documentation, you consider good :)

Sometimes, when the documentation of libraries of software is unclear, instead of asking the author and waiting for a reply, I browse through the source code to find out what the exact behavior is. It sometimes feels like I'm the only who does that.

JavaScript libs have a massive problem with quality and especially with quality of documentation and error reporting

For the entire day I've been staring at this stupid error and can't figure it out. The documentation stating that the source function sets the source dir, but not actual saying what 'source dir' means or what paths are resolved against it is no help either

npm is actually really awesome but almost every library I've tried just fucking sucks

If you have any project (personal or not, doesn't matter) that does not have proper code comments and documentation and you don't want to make one because of the effort (maybe even "wasted" effort), think again. When commenting on a wall of code to say what it does, you may find a better way of doing what you have to do, possibly increasing performance, or improving security.

I have been able to do better input sanitization for a method on a personal project of mine because of this.
Don't use the amount of effort for proper documentation as an excuse not to make one.

Payment gateways are such a big pain to implement. Docs say that they will return values A,B,C but what you end up recieving is X,Y,Z.
And don't get me started on the webhooks, man they return values completely different values from the api end points and with no reference what so ever to the fields returned by them.

Wish i could get the documentation writer's address and may be the dev as well!!

Spent all week 40+ hours attempting to get my companies application up and running using the documentation written by one of the developers. Mind you, 20+ hours pulling and replacing files. Get to the end and nothing works, contact the developer that wrote the set up guide, and he has no idea how to fix and at some point admits her forgot some steps in the documentation and doesn't know what they are. Spent over 6 hours in troubleshooting meetings with that dev and another dev and made no progress. The documentation devs answer to try and fix it every five minutes, "do an iisreset". Fuck you and the camel you rode in on.

I was adding a new API integration into the product today, half of the API Documentation is written like shit, and has mistakes in them.

Okay, I kind of solved what ever errors there were in the documentation and got the API to give a response.
Tried to simulate an error response and all I get is 'Internal Server Error'.

What fucking pieces of shit wrote an API, which doesn't provide a correct error response.
I had to write to the support team in order to get everything clarified.
The elements that were indicated as optional should be there in the request it seems, if you don't want to enter any data for that, pass an empty string to it.
Atleast they could've given a proper error response / their documentation could've been better!

I have become the only thing I always hated in a developer. Building a project without a proper documentation.
As a solo developer in a company where I have to do database architecture, front-end, back-end, testing, NETWORKING (I am the most ignorant guy when it comes to networking), product design, there is no time for documentation.

But hey, I have structured the project, files and functions (with comment, parameters type and return type) properly and I understand what I've done even after 4-5 months without touching that specific project so I got that going for me which is nice... I guess.

Trying (for fun) to run a GNUStep Obj C program that calls c headers has proven something to me:
I really do not know what I am doing with makefiles and should probably slowly and respectfully walk away to continue doing what i was doing in c++

Kids, documentation reading is important.

I also do happen to really like objc

So i applyed for a remote job recently and they assigned me a project as a test. The only requirement is i have to use sails.js as framework along with angular. I am thinking of quitting before i even started. Two days reading the sails documentation and it sucks big time. I am searching how to use sessions and it explains me what a session is. Fuk dis i am out.

Convo b/w me & lecturer.

Me: Is one line that explains exactly what it does okay?
Him: No.
Me: Okay I'll make it a paragraph explaining it a lot more in detail...Is that okay?
Him: Nope, you need to elaborate for laymen.

I don't know what more I can add. Sick of useless documentation. Any one else have this problem?

Let me tell you a story about an independent contractor who was just told the reason I don’t have enough information to build, deploy, access, or test the software I was brought on to maintain…

is that the previous developer is holding all documentation essentially “hostage” in an attempt to squeeze more payment out of the client. What the tap-dancing shit have I gotten myself in to.

y'know what's ironic? people rush over things and avoid meetings, documentation or just speaking to each other, all for the sake of productivity, not realizing that's what destroys the team

Aggravated after having pointed a remote coworker at documentation that would speed along some development he was assigned to do, only to find weeks later, and several "talking past each other" conversations later, that he had disregarded it or severely misunderstood it and went his own route. Showed him today how something was done under what I supposed he had been doing and he reveals he "didn't know" it was to be done that way.

I talked to the client how functionality should look like on UI, draw a mockup, designed and made changes to db schema, created REST api, made documentation how to use it, told frontend developer to make changes on frontend application according to the documentation and mockups. Still no one have fucking clue how to do it. Fucking testers can’t write anything, only clicking.
So I sent curl code how the fucking request should look like exactly then resolved bugs they reported as won’t fucking fix because I will not be also making fucking frontend. Probably they even don’t know what curl is. What a fucking fuck.
And that’s what I am mostly doing from Monday till Friday to keep this project going.
It’s cause client are nice guys and we are doing something good, not some fucking ai, blockchain, big data, financial scam everyone is wanking around.
And friends are asking, why I drink.

Reading documentation for 3rd party software... come across a code snippet which references a class. The class is spelt correctly in the comment but wrong in the code!

What??? Surely if you're going to get it wrong it would be the other way round :/

Finding an awesome new library / framework then finding the documentation is all "this is what it is" rather than "this is how you use it" *sigh*

in class.
professor: "this course is much about learning to read documentation and searching the Internet for solutions. "
me at exam: *writing part of code I learnt from stackoverflow*
...professor failed me at the exam for not using what they taught us during the course.. 😕

Hello, folks, I'm starting to learn Android Studio and for the same, I've attended this workshop held at University which was not very helpful in certain aspects. The guy/mentor assumed that we all knew what is Firebase and started dropping knowledge bombs about firebase and integration with Android Studio(Apps).

So, coming to the fundamental question i.e. I'm reading SO 'Documentation' which is still in beta, I find it useful, as it is scratching the basic surface. What are other sources to learn about Android, of course, sources which are not deprecated?

Being handed an old system to maintain with scant documentation, and being expected to understand exactly how it works.. FFS It looks like a bunch of monkeys on acid got into the codebase 😣 I doubt even they knew what this fucking code does, and they wrote it!

How to create an application using kivy.

- Install Kivy
- Open PyCharm and create your first application
- Follow the documentation
- Try to start the application
- The application crash for a arg that the run() method doesn't require
- Go to google to find the solution
- Don't find any solution

This is what I have done in the last 3 hours
Thanks Kivy

You know just what I love my evening novel to be? Documentation of software, written by someone who clearly doesn’t understand what the fuck this is all on about. Literally created a cyclic paragraph (end of paragraph -> see also paragraph b : end of paragraph b -> see paragraph a) without having explained the concept at all.

Why just whyyy

When in doubt read the documentation. Unless the documentation states quite clearly that your one niche scenario is actually not possible. Then what?

Trial and error.

Taking an existing code base and playing with it to see what does what. Eventually learning enough to create basic programs. Eventually I wanted to make more complicated things so started reading documentation.

I NEED COFFEE HELP PLZ! :'(

I have a long time working on a project, since I started taking coffee in the mornings i realized that the coffee sucks..
So i looked for it and realized that old coffee was processed every day with the new coffee...

Anyways..
Im up to shitty project, shitty pc, shitty documentation, stress, pressure..w/e i don't care..
What I can't FUCKING stand is a disgusting coffee that tastes horrible! D:<
Is it too much to ask?? :'(

Frameworks for Mobile Hybrid Apps.

So we are considering to migrate our native Android app to a Hybrid because the app almost entirely consists of webviews.

what do you think will be the best choice to try.
in terms of performance, documentation, community, ease of writing and maintaining code

Dev: Now that I finally know PHP and JS it must be really easy to find a good framework and use to build my beautiful website.

The options are limited: AngularJS, ReactJS, Ember, ActivateJS, BackboneJS, ExpressJS, Laravel, RactiveJS, Node.JS, Meteor, Knockout, Symphony, Codeignitor

And yes, you thought if you don't like AngularJS you can easily switch to ReactJS. But guess what, every framework will use their own scripting languages like Jade, Blade, Typescript making it learning something new extremely smooth.

The documentation will be part of another rant

Documentation? What documentation?

I can't read a documentation 'til the end. I, on the first few parts, would be like: "Oh this documentation is so good. Why would someone need a tutorial for this?" And then suddenly: "What the fck is this sht? I don't understand life anymore." So I end up buying a course on Udemy cause all the other YouTube tutorials are rubbish.

You can find so many tutorials, learning paths for C#, C++, python, angular, jss, java, etc.
But literally none for batch file programming (if that's even what it's called) so little documentation on cmd.exe and writing .bat files :'(

Can someone please please help?
Just point me in the right direction?

inb4 google it

Is there any documentation on what is public API or not?

@dfox or is reverse engineering the calls allowed?

Need to use new module or pattern:

1. Read the online documentation
2. Have no fu*kin clue what I just read
3. Try for 2 hours and fail.
4. Go home and sleep
5. Wake up at 3am from a fever dream with the solution to the problem
6. Go to work and implement it in 10 min

I guess I learn when I sleep

Worst documentation I have ever dealt with is my own. I have gone back to programs, looked at it, and went, what the heck is even this. I've broken business critical programs just because I didn't know the extent of what I was changing. I've gotten better, because of events like that. OMG!!!!

What is your opinion on Agile?

I was studying through my textbook for a test tomorrow and the Agile Philosophy section sounded like a Team Rocket manifesto at some parts:

Responding to change over following a plan
Individuals and Interactions over processes and tooks
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

Always comment your code.

Write comments that explain the reason for this piece of code existing, and why it's written the way it is.

Don't write comments that explain what your code does (unless it's a comment which is going to be parsed as documentation for an API). If your code needs comments to explain what it's doing, you need to write clearer code.

Finished a validation library and knowing the common excuse for not using code already written (devs come down with 'not invented here' syndrome) is "I would have used it, if there was documentation". Spent this week documenting each class/method, diagrams, scenario based code examples, sent to my boss for review ...

Boss: "Wow...this is fantastic. All our libraries should have this level of documentation. You even updated the project's Nuget package to include a link to the documentation. Devs won't have an excuse now. I'll clear your plate for the rest of the year so you can get started."

What the hell did I just do to myself? FML.

Best tool: The one that has proper documentation.
Worst tool: The one that doesn't have proper documentation.

God, so much times did I have to waste time trying to read the source code myself, trying to figure out what the fuck was going on because the developer didn't take 2 seconds to document what I had to do...
Or commands that I had to use that exist but I only found out about because I read the source code :|

I always enjoying snacking on some popcorn while people argue so, what are your thoughts:
Comments in your code - good or bad?

We used a javascript library before on our project. While reading the documentation, it states that you need to put the ajax response on an .addRow() function in json array.

That was what we did, but it keeps on throwing tons of errors. In the end, we visited our senior dev. Turns out, the function needs an array and not a json array.

I stopped reading documentations since then. And our senior dev stopped talking to us. Hahahajk

Me: IDK how this works. Lets ask support.
PLC Support: Use these ID's to locate what you need in our documentation.
Me: Why the fuck are all of them invald and I cant find shit?!
PLC Support: 🙃🤷

Make the development environment, the code base and the documentation cleaner for the new hires.

My predecessors copied whole repos without clean-up and doc and let me figure out what was working or not. They just 'made' it work. The CI process, if you can call it that, is unstable and overengineered as hell.

I don't want new hires to feel the same dread I did trying to repair other people's stack of mistakes.

So what is worse, no documentation or bad documentation...