I recently pushed an update to CI Twig, a Codeigniter library I created back in 2012 for integrating the Twig templating engine. Twelve years. That’s older than some of the junior developers I’ve worked with. It’s wild to think that something I built when I was still figuring out what I was doing has been sitting there on GitHub this whole time.
CI Twig was one of my first proper open source contributions. Not my first bit of code on the internet, but one of the first things I put out there with the intention of other people actually using it. I remember being nervous about it. What if my code was rubbish? What if someone found a bug and called me out? What if nobody used it at all?
I have spent more time than I care to admit writing technical documentation for Aurelia 2. The docs at docs.aurelia.io have been through countless revisions, rewrites, restructures, and moments where I stared at the screen wondering if I had forgotten how to form sentences.
Writing code is hard. Writing about code in a way that helps other people write code is harder. Nobody prepares you for this.
The first thing you learn is that you do not actually understand the thing you are documenting. You think you do. You have used it, you have built things with it, you can explain it to a colleague at your desk.
I have spent a lot of years writing documentation, first for Aurelia 1 and more recently for Aurelia 2 at docs.aurelia.io. The scale taught me a few things that travel beyond any framework. Good docs are not marketing. Good docs help someone ship. That is the bar I write to.