Documenting code while blogging
2024-05-20 10:16:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
Running a blog while developing code is a great idea. It's a fantastic way to hone your thoughts as you go, and a place to host the stories and activities that led to the software you are building.
Future you will be able to easily look back and remember the thought processes that resulted in taking a particular approach. Another perhaps less talked about reason to run a blog, especially as a solo developer, is as a relatively frictionless way to write basic documentation for the software you are building.
Solo developers don't have much time to spare and often find it difficult to write and keep product documentation up to date. One quick and easy solution to this is to write a blog post introducing major new features, describing general functionality. If you use tags or categories, something most blogging software support, then you have a super easy way to group these documentation posts together.
In this way you'll be able to ensure you have basic documentation available as you go. These posts aren't really supposed to replace full on detailed product documentation, but they might serve as a starting point for writting such a thing if you later need to. They will definitely be useful for early users.
It's also a great way to provide product data to ChatGPT style bots. These have been gaining a lot of popularity recently, and could be a good way for users of your software to get information about the software you are developing.