Programming

Bare minimum place to start: See if you can get the team to agree that these documents should exist in every project root folder:

• README.md - What is this even for? Audience: Managers.
• CONTRIBUTING.md - What steps are needed to build this? What steps are needed to be able to run the tests? Audience: Developers.
• CHANGELOG.txt - Describes the contents of every tagged release. Audience: end users.

Stretch goal: pick a spot (readme is fine) and make a list of sources (data in) and sinks (data out). Include contact information for whoever can reset the credentials or fix the firewall.

This is the sort of thing you have to learn by experience, like how you can't really learn good coding taste from reading a list of rules (though some lists are helpful).

Anyway in my experience documentation is quite different in public (i.e. seen by customers) and private (inside your company). For internal stuff there's a much smaller incentive to document things because:

1. documentation tends to be inconsistent (as you discovered), so people give up looking for it. Instead they just ask other people. This actually works fairly well inside a company because you can generally easily access whoever is responsible (as long as they haven't left).
2. there aren't customers to keep happy and away from support.

I think the best thing to do is to accept that people aren't going to expect documentation internally. There's zero point writing guides to tools on your company wiki or whatever, because nobody will even try to look for it - they'll assume it doesn't exist.

Instead you should try to keep your documentation as close to the user as possible. That means, don't have a separate docs folder in your repo - put your docs as comments in the code.

Don't put deployment instructions on your wiki - add a ./deploy.sh script. It can just echo the instructions initially.

The Code is my Bible.

Things I encounter include incomplete documentation, outdated documentation and written process details that have assumed knowledge which makes it difficult for junior Devs to pick up.

Yeah seems about right... off the top of my head:

• self-host a wiki, use it to document stuff
• write clean code that your future self will have an easy time reading
• avoid automated documenting tools

Be bold and make changes. Document what you find out, what is outdated, what is missing.

Take ownership. If there's nobody that oversees overall structure, be the one to do so - at least where you're touching it or are being bothered by it.

Diatraxis gives some great insight and considerations input into writing and structuring documentation. Namely how different target audiences and doc use cases require different forms and detail levels of guidance.

My company's internal doc/guidance also links to https://www.writethedocs.org/guide/ which seems like a good source.

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.