Writing Documentation

The title really says it all: that’s what I’ve been up to recently.

So, yes — coding, VR and AR development, learning Unity — it’s all taken a bit of a backseat in an attempt to get some more time consuming and generally relevant tasks taken care of. We’ve solved an issue with some web addresses that were bouncing, posts have been migrated from one site to another, but there are still general logistics for the migration going on.

The first is just… making sure there’s general useful documentation for our sites. Our setup is a bit unique, so the current documentation isn’t really what we need, and in any case it focuses a lot more on the general set up than the day-to-day tasks.

The second is tracking our sites. We have a lot of sites installed, but some of those sites have subsites (not included in the installation count), and other sites are HTML-based and therefore not installations (and therefore, uncounted). I’ve been going through each subdomain and tallying up each site, trying to figure out who’s responsible for what and why.

Writing up documentation is a lot more fun than I thought it would be. Thinking through where I’ve run into challenges vs. where others might have issues, and what’s easy to miss but very important… it’s an interesting puzzle. I’m enjoying the process of it. Part of it may also be that I just like writing, and documentation is a good way to keep my hand in. Site tracking is a lot more data entry, so it’s less stimulating, but an audiobook or a podcast in the background keeps my ears going while my brain stays on task.

I’ve been trying out Instagantt, an organizational tool someone else on my team recommended. So far… extremely mixed results.

There’s nothing wrong with the tool itself or any of its features. I like what bits of it I get the chance to use. It’s easy to add tasks, I like the way it tracks tasks and subtasks, marking off tasks is satisfying, it keeps track of lots of information, it’s supposed to be very good for team collaboration…

Except I inevitably cannot keep the page loaded for more than forty-five seconds to a minute without it freezing.

I tested it in multiple browsers. Firefox catches the issue faster than Chrome, but it’s there in both. My only thought right now is that it might be a Windows compatibility issue, but that would be extremely weird for a team product.

I want it to work. I really do. It’s much, much better than my Google Sheets Gantt charts — or it would be, if I could use it.