Project Documentation: Not just for the archives !

I love doing projects ! The sheer joy and euphoria that hits you when the LED bulb glows… Ah those memories! But what if I told you your project is complete only when you write about it. It can be a blog, a journal paper or something bigger. But still, you got to waste time writing about your project rather than working on glowing another bulb! Or is it a waste?

Ahh, LED bulbs :)

In school or college labs, we have lab manuals and record writing. This serves as a tool to record observations from your experiment and infer results from them. But most of us wrote the observations and results only to submit a day before the due, to the teacher. I think you were hit by nostalgia.

We did all these with a cursory attitude and did not pay attention to what you were writing. It was just to please the teachers so as to gain good grades. But there’s more to writing or documenting your work.

Those days!

Documenting your project work is a great advantage for you. It can help

1. In acting as a reference to you (probably if you’re extending something from one LED bulb to an LED Matrix, later in your late 30s), your reference would be a good starting point.
2. In showcasing your projects to Potential professors, Employees or even your friends. (Your resumes can be filled with a bunch of text or just a link to your GitHub/medium page, You choose!)
3. Serve as a tutorial guides if you want to support anyone working on something similar to your project.

That’s what I am talking about

So where to document?

We have many places to document depending on what your project scope is. Few options are

1. Medium: An amazing place to write about your projects. It provides a user friendly dashboard, where you can just focus on writing and not any editing and the likes. Project Scope, Project Uses, anything about your project can be filled up here.
2. WordPress: A place where you can have your entire portfolio of projects. This is like Medium + a lot of freedom to edit your website. But with great freedom comes a fairly steep learning curve. But if you want to put up your resume, your hobbies along with some videos and other media, WordPress can help you out!
3. GitHub: The haven for coders to store code, collaborate with folks around the world and the major boost for Open Source Community! A lot of the folks today are putting up their GitHub profiles on their resumes. So I think if you want put your project code in a safe place, collaborate with people all over the world and also want to have a separate webpage for your pages, GitHub is your perfect abode.
4. Heroku: Now that you have documented your project, written about it on Medium/WordPress and stored the code on GitHub, let’s have some more fun. Heroku is an amazing platform to deploy your code on the cloud and sharing amongst your folks to see your project work like magic! However since we are doing magic, there’s a steeper learning curve here. But if you’re interested to see your project run, here’s your place.

There a few which I have skipped like Google Sites (Paid), Bitbucket(Similar to GitHub) and many more.

So get started with your project and make sure to document your work today!

If you have tried out other tools which are missing here, be sure to write it in the comment section. Documenting is useful after all ;)