The Surprising Power of Documentation
This is too biased for-docs IMHO*. I do agree with many points, documentation IS amazing, and you are very likely under-documenting things in your company. But documentation is not cheap to create, and specially it&#x27;s not cheap to maintain. If you are not writing enough yes, sure, that&#x27;s probably a great investment, but start bit by bit.<p>I&#x27;ve worked in <i>multiple* companies where the problem was too much documentation, and of course everyone was afraid to update or </i>ghasps* remove any piece of old documentation in case it was still useful. Imagine working on a codebase where 80% of the code was unused or commented out but no one dared changing it just in case (flashback to 2010 with 4000 lines of style.css).<p>I&#x27;d suggest to take a more holistic approach and treat documentation a lot like testing; for that prototype, probably just write the barebones documentation, for the production-ready new feature go all-in and write detailed documentation, tutorials, etc.<p>If you do want to go deeper with documentation, then you&#x27;ll need a dedicated team (like a team of testers) that work exclusively on documentation. At some point it does make sense to hire only for that, and it can even be a differentiating point for your startup if done correctly.<p>For libraries, a ratio I&#x27;ve seen works pretty well is approx 1:3:5 for lines of code:tests:docs; you can do tests first, or even documentation first, but once everything is finished and if you count the amount of lines that&#x27;s a decent ratio. Note that when counting &quot;lines of docs&quot; in an editor, a whole paragraph will count as just 1, so in reality there&#x27;s a lot more docs.<p>Note: I&#x27;m the creator of both <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;documentation.page&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;documentation.page&#x2F;</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;documentation.agency&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;documentation.agency&#x2F;</a><p>* (only 2 &quot;negative&quot; paragraphs on a book-length article)