Principles and Practices / Project Management

Reflection

As I am setting up my documentation site, I have been contemplating how I want to write my entries. Should they take the form of a journal or provide straightforward step-by-step instructions? We were encouraged to document our progress as we go, including our mistakes, challenges, and how we overcame them. I believe this is a fantastic way of learning and will serve as valuable references, particularly when you or someone else pursuing similar projects in the future.

Initially, I was concerned about documentation because, ironically, I have never really done it before, despite having worked as a full-stack web developer for almost 7 years. However, I recently had a realization - I do document things, but only for myself. Whenever I embark on learning something new, I usually take handwritten notes, whether on paper or digitally using OneNote or my tablet. This is rooted in research that suggests writing by hand helps with better information retention, even though it takes longer compared to typing. I have even considered publishing some of these notes as tutorials if I ever create a blog, which is another irony. My initial intention in learning web development was to build a portfolio website and a blog. Yeah, that never happened.

But look at all those notes I took, the screenshots probably only show no more than 10% of the whole page. It is massive and might be hard to follow for other people, except me. Whenever I read a tutorial, I always prefer the clear and straightforward ones. So which approach should I choose? Why not have both? I have decided to structure my documentation in the following way:

1. Each week, I will have an overview page such as this one. It will contain a short summary of how the week went, what I learned, and a to-do list of assignments that need to be completed.
2. If the assignment documentation for the week is quite long, I plan to break it apart into multiple posts instead of having one massive post. I want each post to read like a single-topic tutorial. For example, for this week's assignment, I will have one post about my final project ideas, another post talking about setting up my development environment, and another about setting up Nuxt Content + Tailwind CSS as my static site generator stack.
3. Throughout my documentation, I will insert commentary sections like this one. This is where I will include personal notes, comments, or remarks that will make the post read like a journal. You can choose to hide the commentary if you prefer to read my posts like tutorials, using the toggle switch on the bottom left of the page. [ I will work on implementing this feature after I finish my week 01 documentation first and decide where the final placement for the toggle switch. ]

My goal is to provide extensive commentary on every part of my documentation, but we will have to see if it is a realistic goal or not, considering that the workload and difficulty of the assignments will increase as the program progresses. I hope I haven't unwittingly set myself up for an endless task.