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On the importance of writing things down

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Interdictor
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On the importance of writing things down

Was just clicking around reddit and noticed that Cryptic is shutting down the Foundry (player mission creator) for both Star Trek Online and Neverwinter because "the legacy knowledge required to maintain the Foundry at our quality standards is no longer available." In other words a dev that was in charge of the system left and took their knowledge/expertise with them. As most of us can recall - something very similar happened in City of Heroes as well, most notably in the Base Building system.

Now, where MWM is building off of UE4 and not a house engine, I'm sure that may give them a bit of leeway and a common base to work off of, but it's still probably a good idea for devs to at least make detailed development notes, and probably also to avoid over-specialization in any one particular game system. Have coders be familiar with a few systems in the game, don't put all your eggs in one basket, and so on and so forth, etc....

avelworldcreator
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Actually that's been an

Actually that's been an inhouse conversation here. I've been trying to automate some of our documentation process but it's still a work in progress unfortunately.

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Esp for any of those not

Esp for any of those not staying on for the professional era.


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Not only do you need to have

Not only do you need to have written documentation for coding practices, but you also need written documentation for customer service issues, so as to make sure that responses to incoming tickets aren't just handled ad hoc depending on how the customer service agent feels at the time.


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avelworldcreator wrote:
avelworldcreator wrote:

Actually that's been an inhouse conversation here. I've been trying to automate some of our documentation process but it's still a work in progress unfortunately.

For what's it worth documentation (of any kind) is usually the hardest part of any software project to juggle properly. It's almost always overlooked, understaffed, underappreciated, etc. I wish you luck in handling it.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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Used to work on robots. There

Used to work on robots. There was about 2 million lines of code that controlled these things. About half of that was contained in closed libraries that I couldn't open to interpret. The rest was 95% undocumented. Any time there was a problem I'd spend about 95% of my time interpreting and adding comments for my own sanity. Then I'd spend about an hour on the phone asking why this particular variable is read from the sensor then passed through 15 different functions without actually being used in any of them before the final variable is used in Main(). Then after being told I absolutely can not remove the redundant variable operations, I actually address the problem. (and then six weeks later they comment out the change and rewrite the whole section.)

The moral of your story, comment your code.

avelworldcreator
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I'm dealing with the lack of

I'm dealing with the lack of much commenting right now. I can't complain very loudly because I'm just as guilty. The time crunch tends to force this important step to be set aside for the sake of expediency I'm afraid.

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Lothic
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Grimfox wrote:
Grimfox wrote:

The moral of your story, comment your code.

One of the worst excuses for not commenting code (and trust me I'm sure I'm guilty of this as well) is that you can fall into this self-defeating spiral of thinking that whatever you're working on is so self-evident and straightforward that "anyone" should just be able to look at the code and instantly understand it.

The trap of course is that whatever code you're working on today might actually be completely clear and trivial to you because that's what you're focusing on and thinking about at the moment. It's easy to understand the things you're currently dealing with right now. The trick is when you've stopped looking at that particular code for several months then have to go back and re-look at it again and suddenly realize it's "clear as mud" and you basically have to "re-learn" whatever your code is supposed to be doing because it's obviously not straightforward.

Figuring out someone's else's spaghetti code is hard enough - having to re-figure out your OWN spaghetti code can be agonizing.

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Not commenting and

Not commenting and documenting code (or work in general) often leads to a cost in productivity in the long term when someone has to figure out what they are looking at. Let's be honest, sometimes the person trying to figure out what they are looking at is the person that wrote it a few months later....

That being said, technical writing (and writing in general) is a skill, and anytime you require people to be proficient in multiple skills you make it harder to find people. It isn't that different from requiring your programmer to be speak multiple languages or be a good cook.

And this is a volunteer project, so they can't really afford to be that picky.

In an ideal world everything is commented and documented but we're stuck in this reality. As much as I firmly believe everyone should strive to be the best they can be, constantly learn new things, and make the world a better place.... I understand the intense pressures and tough situations that result in poor documentation.

It can also result from darker and more petty motivations like office politics. I've seen people try to inflate their own importance or torpedo others by subtly attempting to control access to knowledge and playing it off as unimportant. That is a different conversation though. People can be awful sometimes.

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Grimfox wrote:
Grimfox wrote:

The moral of your story, comment your code.

You'd think this would be self-evident, but the reality is that in a lot of organizations, there's institutional resistance to even the most basic good coding practices.

In my current project -- an interactive fiction novel, where I'm writing both the story text and the underlying code -- I have editors complaining that the comments I put in the code are "distracting".

They also hate modular design structure, but that's another story entirely.

Can't win for losing.

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See, I was taught in my last

See, I was taught in my last coding class (C), that commenting is useless as people tend to edit the code and leave the comments, so as the code ages, the comments become more archaic.


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Well, in my own coding (Only

Well, in my own coding (Only HTML, granted) I at least try to comment about what each segment is supposed to DO. I did that in my C+ class and got a 'gold-star' from the teacher.

Be Well!
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This is something I’m

This is something I’m discovering more and more ever since I’ve become a project manager. It goes beyond coding even, into the writing of business requirements and business rules. You’d be shocked (or maybe you WOULDN’T be shocked) how much resistance there is to writing strong business rules that are clear and concise and use language that someone new to the systems can come in and understand.

Passing on institutional knowledge can be as easy as writing up an instruction guide before moving on, or as hard as documenting the functional specs and coding associated with rules. But if it’s not done it cripples the ability to provide long term service to a system - and even undermines efforts to find requirements when replacing a system (I’m encountering that right now)!

Please track your stuff. Jot down your notes and pass on institutional knowledge. It will provide for the long term success of your business, systems, and procedures, even after you leave.

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desviper wrote:
desviper wrote:

See, I was taught in my last coding class (C), that commenting is useless as people tend to edit the code and leave the comments, so as the code ages, the comments become more archaic.

Yeah because once you've typed something in a flat text file you can never edit it... *face palm*

Even before the days of automated code management systems that practically force you to add info to "change logs" so that you have a running history of every edit made to a file I worked on projects that specifically encouraged you to add your own change comments to the tops of files precisely so that you could keep the history of edits made.

Whoever told you that "commenting is useless because people don't update them" should be one of the first people up against the wall when the revolution breaks out...

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Whoever told you that "commenting is useless because people don't update them" should be one of the first people up against the wall when the revolution breaks out...

Thank you for this Lothic, made my day.

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What I learned as clean code:

What I learned as clean code:

Commented; fitting names for variables, functions, classes, interfaces, etc; perfect amount of whitespace

Comments should be everywhere fitting. Git commits, code, documentation. Everything that isn't obvious for other people outside the original devs.
What I sometimes do is asking a colleague to read through my spaghetti, so he can explain to me what it does. If he's able to do that in less than 10 sentences, I did it right, if not... Well... Needs more commenting.

Comments are always needed, especially if you're new in a team and you absolutely never touched that particular code before.
Bigger API, programs and plug-ins should definitely have a written documentation in it. (Github is great for that, look at the wiki functionality)
But I guess it depends on workflows here, as well. Some teams expect big documents, others don't. I'm personally someone who likes to see dozens of pages of information. It's better than a single page of so obvious data and definitely better than nothing.

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DesViper
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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
desviper wrote:

See, I was taught in my last coding class (C), that commenting is useless as people tend to edit the code and leave the comments, so as the code ages, the comments become more archaic.

Yeah because once you've typed something in a flat text file you can never edit it... *face palm*

Even before the days of automated code management systems that practically force you to add info to "change logs" so that you have a running history of every edit made to a file I worked on projects that specifically encouraged you to add your own change comments to the tops of files precisely so that you could keep the history of edits made.

Whoever told you that "commenting is useless because people don't update them" should be one of the first people up against the wall when the revolution breaks out...

That professor's a lot of why I never finished my CompSci minor....also I was out of money :p


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As the guy integrating

As the guy integrating everyone else's work I can attest my own need for comments. I even wish there was a way to add comments to the file system.

Much of the game project is being assembled as a set of plugins. In the descriptor of those there is a spot where you can provide a link to a documentation website for that plugin. I have put placeholder links in each of those descriptors as well as putting file/folder stubs in each plugin's resources directory as a local backup. No content has been put there yet but I'm pushing things that direction.

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avelworldcreator wrote:
avelworldcreator wrote:

No content has been put there yet but I'm pushing things that direction.

So long as you're pushing a little harder than Morticia Addams ... that's the best we can hope for (I suppose) ...


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