news.ycombinator.com• Dec 16, 2024• 1 min read
Ask HN: Documentation in an EmergencyMy teammates and I are in a bit of bad spot and I have to make a quick decision.For reasons I won't get into the lead developer (and a few non devs) at my employer abruptly left the company that now includes 4 full time developers, and one dev ops person (who just joined recently).For many years the lead developer worked both cooperatively, and semi isolated from the development team pushing out code, altering database schema, and so on. Much of the knowledge of how the system works, both day to day operational processes, technical documentation, and so on are a mystery.We're now faced with learning / investigating / putting out fires on the fly and we've all agreed we need to document everything as we go and start now. My first thought when it came to documentation was a wiki like Wikipedia. Nice big pages where content is king, easy to link page to page, and edit.As I've looked around I've found all sorts of "wiki" like documentation options but I'm both overwhelmed at the variety of