Well worth the long wait for this long read: Mark had an essay two years ago about Interrupts and Context Switching, and now has written the next post in the intended series about Communication. It’s also worth reading his thoughts about Arranging Interests in Parallel.
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Meh. I don’t have much trouble cranking out documentation anymore. Wasn’t always that way, mind you, but on my last project there were an awful lot of conversations like this:
coworker: How does [some feature] work?
me: Have you looked in the manual? That’s covered in section 3.
coworker: Uh…. No…
or
coworker: I get an error when I issue this command.
me: What’s the status I return? There’s a table on page 121.
coworker: Uh…..
My manual for that particular project ran to 1600 pages when it was all over, but I did the bits that affected my coworkers (packet formats, log entry formats, custom Lua commands, etc.) up front so they had stuff to work from. Yeah, it was a bit of a moving target, but I did pretty good at keeping them up to date.
‘Course, I’m working for the gummint these days, so I don’t have the same sort of deadline pressures I used to have…