Marc Brooker

And so I think what, you know, for me, it separates a valuable doc writing and thinking process from a busy work process is understanding what you're getting out of it.

And what you're getting out of it might be an artifact to share with the future, which is super valuable.

Either your future self, if you've got a terrible memory like me, or, you know, new teams, new people, people, you know, or I want to share something with customers or I want to share something with the world.

And so that's super valuable.

Or I want to write down something so I can think through a really difficult, often one-way door, kind of hard to change technical decision or API design decision.

And I'm not going to do that every time I make a technical decision.

It's not worth it because a lot of those technical decisions are either easy or not as critical or can just be taken back if we figure out they're wrong.

But I am going to spend my time that way when there are key decisions to make, when there are key insights to find.

And I think, you know, and so it is that, like, what is the purpose of writing that separates well-spent time from poorly spent time?

Now there are people who still don't like writing, even when it's well spent time, even when it's like, you know, you have to explain this piece of technology to, you know, to a future team.

Um, I think that's a skill worth developing, you know, sometimes you, you do need to, you know, uh, eat your vegetables, uh, you know, and it's, it's, it is a skill worth getting good at.

Um,

And especially in documenting the core kind of technical decisions behind a design is so useful.

And that's useful in two ways, by the way.

Like one of them is, as we think about building a big system,

we make thousands of decisions.

And some of those decisions are very carefully chosen, very particular, and very impactful.

And some of those decisions are the best thing we could guess in the moment based on having no data to make that decision.

It's super useful for people who are coming in to improve that system down the line to be able to look at the design and say, which of these things were very carefully chosen and thought through, and which of these things were arbitrary.

And because the arbitrary things like, okay, well, I'm going to change that.