What you are MISSING by skipping ️ the docs 📑

Reading software documentation is a skill that is going to either speed up your workflow or throttle it.

Skipping the documentation === Slower workflow

My story:

During a recent project, I had to learn a new framework (Symfony) all along with some DevOps tools (like Docker and GitHub) and during the process I realized how crucial of a role can software documentation be.

My only sources of information in the beginning (first 2–3 weeks) were YouTube tutorials using older versions of the technologies. I would copy/paste some lines of code, get an Exception or error and spend the next 3 to 4 hours on Stack Overflow or on GitHub issues trying to figure out what’s wrong with my code. I would rarely skim through the docs solely to find what would make the cut for what I’m looking for at the moment.

While this approach has helped me to pick up things fast (or was I just thinking that it did ?), it hasn’t made me the most efficient, nor made my code the cleanest. My code worked (at least on my machine), but was hard (sometimes even impossible) to explain.

This was THROTTLING my workflow.

Learned lessons:

Things that can help streamline the required work often get missed in this seemingly “time saving” rush. But reading the documentation of the technology you are using is not a waste of time, I would even argue the opposite, it is a time and energy investment in the mid to long term, since it has significant advantages:

• Understanding the basics of the technology helps you avoid mistakes later on, leading you to save more time.
• The closest you get to the source, the more accurate the information will be (and yes, this also applies to most answers you’ll find on websites like Stackoveflow since they are mostly based on the documentation).
• You become unstoppable. As you progress in your career, you will encounter more and more problems (we are problem solvers after all), and there can’t always be ready-to-follow tutorials.

In the future, I’m planning to learn a new framework (ReactJS) based primarily on the docs, and I highly encourage you to do so as well, so that we make sure that we are “maxing our gains”.

fread( $documentation ) === max( $gains )

Conclusion

In brief, wherever you are in your learning journey of a new technology, framework, or tool, reading its documentation is the primary way to level up in it. It is a trivial skill and one you can only learn by practicing. Don’t get discouraged if you struggle with your first attempts, it gets easier with time.

Don’t get discouraged if you struggle with your first attempts, it gets easier with time.