Weekly Journal 9 - Documentation, Social Media

Synopsis

This week was even worse than last week in terms of having time to do anything technical. Most of my personal work was centered around management tasks and documentation. I got a lot of work done in those areas this past week, so I am hoping I will have more time to do something interesting this coming week.

Documentation

I have had a significant amount of documentation work in the backlog for several months now. This week I took some time to get some of that completed and off my list. At work, we use a git repository to contain all of our internal documentation. We use GitHub, so it makes it easy for everyone to have a current version of the documentation and keep it synchronized.

While there are plenty of tools out there for managing documentation, I am a huge fan of keeping it simple. Our documentation consists of plaintext Markdown files stored in git. It doesn’t get much simpler than that, and thanks to GitHub we get a nice web interface with search. You also get a nice audit trail and change history, which keeps the compliance folks happy. I would highly suggest giving it a shot for your documentation needs before investing time and effort into a more complicated documentation management system.

Social Media

These past couple of months I have been reviewing my social media accounts to see if I really need them. Between the issues with content gate-keeping, fake news, and privacy I am taking a long look at the big tech companies I use. So far this year, I have deleted accounts on Twitch and Pinterest. For now, I am keeping my LinkedIn account as it does have some uses for work, but part of me would really like to get away from that too.

What’s Next?

Good question. This week I will be spending some time on strategic planning, but I should have some time to look at doing some technical work too.