Developing Code in Your Own Style
I have been doing a fair bit of coding on a few projects this last week, and yesterday I spent a good bit of time documenting an Xcode project I've spent a couple of weeks on. This was all because I'd moved it to GitHub, and the standard there is to look for a README.md file at the root of the repo and render it in GitHub Flavored Markdown as an introduction or initial documentation on the work in the repo. Since I hadn't had it in GitHub before this, I didn't need to make the documentation. After all, there's only one other guy on the project, and he's not yet done any work with this library, so it wasn't important to do it previously, but it made sense to do it now.
After spending several hours on this documentation - complete with code samples, installation instructions for the server-side required components (PHP, PostgreSQL, Apache), and everything I could think of about the project, my partner in this venture looked at it, deemed it nice, but said "We have to work on de-personalizing the docs".
Immediately, I was taken aback. I worked very hard on the docs, and while they aren't perfect, I was surprised to see exactly how I felt about that comment from him. I wasn't upset - not really. I was just irked.
After 38 yrs of being a professional programmer, and all this is still not making me a dime, I think I was feeling that I deserved the opportunity to write docs the way that I feel they should be written. I'm writing code the way I think it should be written, so why not the docs as well? It's got a wealth of information in there, and while the comment wasn't a serious critique, it was something that I just didn't see coming.
More importantly, it got me to thinking: At what point in your life do you really get to do what you want to do? I suppose the answer to many is obvious: Never. Others will say just as assuredly: Always.
Clearly, neither is right. There are certain times you can do certain things and everything is fine. I'm sure he was thinking that the documentation needed for a 510k medical instrument was more formal than I was writing. Maybe so, and I understand where he was coming from, but it didn't really lesson the question any.
After all, I'm in the middle of my fourth month of forced unemployment, and I'm finding that there are a lot of people out there that are getting jobs after being laid off from the same company a lot faster than I am. I'm not jealous of them, I'm just very surprised at the difficult that I'm having. But I have faith - it'll all come together at the right time with the right company, and things will pick up again.
And my choice to take this time to write code for a project that by all accounts might never see the light of day, let alone generate anything more than lunch-money for me, is all on me. No one forced me into it. No one told me it'd make me rich. OK, I fibbed there, my partner in this said that, but I knew right off he was a little over the top on this.
But I'd still like to think that after 38 yrs of being a professional developer. I know how to document my own code. But maybe for this certain instance, for this certain licensing with the FDA, I don't.
Kinda bites to realize that.