I recently hired into a data analytics team for a hospital, and we don’t have a style guide. Lots of frustration from folks working with legacy code…I thought putting together a style guide would help folks working with code they didn’t write, starting with requiring a header for SQL scripts first as low hanging fruit.
Or so I thought.
My counterpart over application development says that we shouldnt be documenting any metadata in-line, and he’d rather implement “docfx” if we want to improve code metadata and documentation. I’m terrified of half-implementing yet another application to further muddy the waters–i’m concerned it will become just one-more place to look while troubleshooting something.
Am I going crazy? I thought code headers were an industry standard, and in-line comments are regarded as practically necessary when working with a larger team…
Yes, serious people write docs. I hate this bullshit about code that should be so good that it’s “auto-documenting.” It never happens in real life. Code is at best of average quality, but it needs documentation. At my previous job they had “guidelines” to make sure that code didn’t needed doc. It was a bad joke and we had the worst code I’ve ever seen.
I don’t have solutions for you though. You need a combo of documentation generation, code formatter (in the CI maybe, or before a commit), and code linters to check for errors.
“Self-documenting” just means “(I thought) I understood it when I wrote it, so you should too”. In other words, it really means “I don’t want to document my code”
I like it better when the docs are embedded in the code or alongside them. Everywhere I’ve worked it is a pain trying to find some random Confluence page or whatever where some API doc is.
Also if it’s not in the code, it will get outdated quickly and nobody will ever look at it. Separate docs are only really useful for main concepts that are not going to change that quickly.