Peter Hilton is a software developer, writer, speaker, trainer, and musician. Peter's professional interests are business process management, web application development, functional design, agile software development and project management. He currently works as a programmer and technical writer on a workflow management product team, and also delivers the occasional lecture and training course. Peter's software development interests include web application frameworks, software development methodology and practices, and web-based collaboration. Peter's speciality is web application architecture, design and build. Peter has presented at several European developer conferences, including ACCU, Scala eXchange, Devoxx, Øredev, Jfokus, Javazone and geecon. Peter co-authored 'Play for Scala' (Manning Publications) and is a Typesafe certified trainer for 'Fast Track to Play with Scala'.
Documentation avoidance for developers - How to get away with less documentation and spend more time writing code
However good your code, other people never seem to get it. Instead they ruin your day (and your productivity) by asking questions and expecting documentation. You need to know how to explain code without getting stuck in meetings or spending half your time on the only thing you hate more than meetings: writing documentation. Instead, you aim for constructive laziness: tactics that give you more time to write code.
This talk teaches you how to avoid writing documentation, by making it unnecessary or delegating the work to someone else. You will also learn how to deal with the awkward situation when you can’t away with avoidance or delegation, and have to write the documentation yourself.
This talk explores what we talk about when we talk about code, how we do it, and the tools we use. You can often find a better tool than documentation, but not always. Not everyone writes detailed specifications these days, but remote working and distributed teams make written explanations more valuable than ever. Talking face to face requires less effort, but you rarely or never meet the authors of most of the code you see. Software craftsmanship has failed to make written documentation unnecessary. Instead we shall turn to README-Driven Development, comments evasion, documentation-avoidance, just-in-time documentation and the art of not writing it in the first place.