3 ms·
>but having documentation is in no way mandatory for releasing your thing into the wild. No. It's not mandatory to have documentation (or even, gasp, good doc
by nobody9999 3y ago
>but having documentation is in no way mandatory for releasing your thing into the wild.
No. It's not mandatory to have documentation (or even, gasp, good documentation), but easy access to quality information about functionality and usage significantly enhances the UX.
If you're actually charging money for your product, especially if it's a product that isn't strictly for tech folks (e.g., IOT devices, end-user applications, LOB application frameworks, etc.) you better have some decent documentation or you're asking for a world of hurt.
With Discord (bots notwithstanding), you need actual, meat-based agents to handle the support channel(s). Providing quality documentation reduces the support load, and over the long term, likely reduces support costs significantly.
What's more, making folks jump through hoops to get answers to questions, most of which are about ordinary usage/configuration/dependency/etc. options is not a good look.
I'm not rejecting Discord and similar environments as support channels, but we should use the right tool for the right job.
As an old guy, I remember the DEC days, and as Ken Olsen put it[0]:
One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic
is our support for UNIX?
Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago.
Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our
VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand,
easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual
users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines.
And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have
good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.
It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run
out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end
up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.
With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly
check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no
matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation
-- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty
of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there.
-- Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984
[It's been argued that the beauty of UNIX is the same as the beauty of Ken
Olsen's brain. Ed.]
Now, Olsen was wrong about Unix/unix-like platforms. But he was right about documentation, especially in a business context.
These days, of course, you don't need physical, paper documentation and that's a good thing.
Would you rather have to connect to a Discord channel (assuming you know the right one to use), have searches for similar issues return copious useless results, watch your question/issue slide off the page (potentially) with multiple other conversations going on, and wait for someone (who may or may not have a clue) to attempt to answer your question or,
open a browser tab, search the indexed documentation and quickly see all the relevant options, capabilities and/or specifications?
Now get off my lawn! :) :)
[0] https://motd.ambians.com/quotes.php/name/freebsd_fortunes_2/toc_id/1-0-3/s/247 https://motd.ambians.com/quotes.php/name/freebsd_fortunes_2/...