Get good at what no one else does
Reading documentation is the thing that nobody wants to do. People want to be able to build and look productive. Complete sprint points, close tickets, speak big about products and features, and deliver on time.
Reading documentation is none of those things. But reading documentation is often the proper precursor to all of those things.
More and more often I come across architecture that was based on a false understanding of a technology. Or needless complexity and confusion in codebase from misused pattern. Stumbling blocks that cause headaches for teams and slow down everyone, just because no one wanted to read the documentation for 30 minutes.
For example, my team spent three months debugging our system when dealing with a bunch of duplicate jobs executing. This caused large problems with our customers. It wasn’t solved until we finally read the documentation on how RabbitMQ’s definitions of ACK & NACK. It wasn’t solved until we read the documentation on how RabbitMQ handles reconnections.
It is crazy how a whole team of engineers can think, “Yeah I know Rabbit, it’s just a message queue. I don’t need to read the docs, it’s simple”, and delay effective problem solving. The answer is simple. Do the work and READ.
You want to be an expert at something?
Read the docs. Trust me, no one else is going to stop you.
Don’t just assume how something operates. That’s not a good engineering practice. Computer science and programming is an artificial field and it is perfectly knowable. Don’t go introducing unknowns into your systems, and if there are any, figure them out.
Maybe you’re the new kid on the team and there’s no documentation on how a system works. Good news, the code is the documentation now. Start reading. It might be the worst form of documentation, but at least it’s the truest form.
No Cheating
AI doesn’t change the game in this regard. AI can help you read documentation, but it can’t read it for you. You still need to know how to steer AI in the right direction. Even if the AI understands perfectly, if you don’t, you steer the AI ignore the documentation or misuse a tool. At the end of the day you are responsible for the code that you and your AI creates.
Read the fucking manual if you want to get good.