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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • No worries, sounds like you’re definitely on the right track with your approach.

    In terms of the style of editor I don’t have a strong preference, I think the most important thing is discoverability which generally means putting docs where they are expected to be found and using whatever your team or org is using. Personally I have a slight preference for markdown mainly because it’s easy to version control, see who wrote what (so I can ask them questions) and use all the tools I’m used to that work well with plain text. Tools that use more WYSIWYG style can be good too though and many of them like Notion have the advantage of making it relatively easy to search across your entire companies documentation assuming everyone uses the one tool.

    For my personal notes I use Logseq which I highly recommend. It’s a bit of both, markdown under the hood but with a simple editor that lets you focus on writing notes, tasks and links.


  • I would say as a new junior dev you are uniquely placed to help with this. Documentation tends to be written by people who know a lot about a thing and they try to imagine what might be useful for someone. Someone new coming in with a fresh perspective can help uncover assumed knowledge or missing leaps to make the documentation better. One of the common onboarding steps I’ve seen is to go back and update/improve the onboarding docs after you’ve just been onboarded for example.

    I would say pick your battles though because documentation can be a never ending task and documents are almost always out of date shortly after they are written. Think about what would have saved you time or mental overhead if it was just written down and fix those first.

    As far as organising and writing, every place is different and it can depend on the tools your org is using. In general I’d at least have links to relevant docs as close to where they might be needed as possible. Like how to set up and get up and running with a code base should probably be documented directly in the readme, or at least linked to if it’s overly complicated.

    Hopefully that’s at least somewhat helpful. It’s definitely a problem basically everywhere I have worked though, you have to do what you can and not stress too much about it.






  • Maybe there’s a good argument for nonviolence but “the means dictate the ends” isn’t it imo. It could be that there’s more to it in the book but presented as is I’d say it doesn’t follow logically, I’m going to want to see proof that it’s actually true which is going to be tricky because there are obvious counter examples.

    The easiest one is probably Ukraine. I’m sure most Ukrainians want to live in a peaceful and nonviolent society, but if they took your principle to heart there would be no Ukraine right now.






  • Yes I agree, and just because there is a methodology doesn’t make the result not arbitrary. Can you explain what number four means? How do I assess it, what’s a 0, what’s a 5 and what’s a 10? How does number 2 relate to bias, isn’t that a factuality rating thing , why is it in the bias rubric? It’s a joke, each rating is totally arbitrary as there is no definition of what each one means beyond some vague description of the category. It’s essentially pick a number, feels based.

    I have worked with qualitive rubrics before and this one is barely worthy of the name honestly. Two people could take this rubric away and come to completely opposite conclusions based on their own biases.





  • The placement of the yellow dot is determined through a composite score derived from four distinct categories: Biased Wording/Headlines, Factual/ Sourcing, Story Choices, and Political Affiliation. Each category is rated on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0. indicating a lack of bias and 10 representing extreme bias. The average of these four scores is then plotted on the scale to indicate the source’s overall Left-Right bias.

    I wouldn’t call picking four numbers 'a whole lot more ’ personally. If you actually read some of the bias analysis it becomes more obvious how arbitrary it is.