Document before automating | Mastering Laravel

As devs, sometimes we rush to coding a solution. But there's an important step that should come first.

Joel Clermont

2023-10-19

I'm trying to get better about documenting procedures for myself. As an example: producing an episode of our Laravel podcast. Between recording, sending files for edit, reviewing the edit, transcription, publishing and marketing, I captured 12 distinct steps.

I can do it from memory (and have been), but it's easy to miss something. Or maybe I want to take a vacation and make Aaron do this while I'm gone. Now that I have it documented, I don't have to worry about it getting done to my high standards.

Now, if I want to save even more time, I can start to automate some of those steps. But even if I don't, I'm glad I took the time to document first.

There likely lots of repetitive things we all do on a regular basis. The developer brain may immediately reach for a code solution, but don't skip over the documentation step.

Here to help,

Joel

P.S. We've started publishing our podcast to our YouTube channel, if that's more of your thing.

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