Write documentation first, then build
&gt; So when Bezos—in a possibly apocryphally, 128-word memo—wrote that “All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces,” it was a focused idea that led to Amazon building web services for which it’d be it’s own best customer, and turned AWS into the cloud computing juggernaut it is today.<p>Last I checked, almost every AWS api has a V2. And wait, I just checked, AWS CDK is on V2.28.0. I wonder why the last 28 versions of V2 didn&#x27;t work if they wrote the documentation first?<p>Last I checked, Mac OS is on like version 11 or something? I&#x27;m not a Mac user so I don&#x27;t follow this stuff.<p>Clearly, documentation is not a silver bullet. If it was, we wouldn&#x27;t have to continue to rewrite and bump the versions of all of our tools. When I worked at Amazon, writing that 6 page document was like agonizing torture. They would ask me what the minimal latency of the API I was creating would be, and how am I supposed to know that?? I don&#x27;t know what other APIs I may or may not have to call to actually get this to work. Implementation details matter <i>a lot</i>.<p>I don&#x27;t remember who said this, but there&#x27;s a saying that&#x27;s something like ideas are worth nothing. Execution is worth everything. And the same thing goes for documentation, what good is documentation without a final product? It&#x27;s useless.