An appeal to makers - why you should document your project, and how you can do it

Duplicating my comment from there, here: :)

Nice writeup. This is a topic of interest to me as a result of improving (mostly :) ) my project documentation habits over time.

One suggestion on the ordering of items in your list of "primary reasons"--in my experience the strongest motivator (though selfish) when documenting a project is that the documentation is useful to the author first. When you know you're going to benefit it just seems to be a little more immediate gratification rather than the more altruistic "for others" motivation.

I prefer to think of it as a "selfish" motivation that benefits both yourself and the world. :)

I definitely agree that starting small is best--it's much easier to write something when you're only doing it a couple of sentences at a time.

A few years ago (before the creation of hackaday.io et al) I created a site named Labradoc intended to make it easier to create project logs like those you describe. Of course, I had grand visions of providing a service to other developers/makers/hackers but we're all too cheap to pay. ;) So, mostly it's just for me and enjoys from some retro 2011 styling. :D

Here's my list of projects: http://labradoc.com/i/follower

A representative example: www.labradoc.com/.../project-sms-text-scroller

And a more developed than normal example: www.labradoc.com/.../notes-esp8266

You've covered the points--both motivations and fears--well. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.

Duplicating my comment from there, here: :)

Nice writeup. This is a topic of interest to me as a result of improving (mostly :) ) my project documentation habits over time.

One suggestion on the ordering of items in your list of "primary reasons"--in my experience the strongest motivator (though selfish) when documenting a project is that the documentation is useful to the author first. When you know you're going to benefit it just seems to be a little more immediate gratification rather than the more altruistic "for others" motivation.

I prefer to think of it as a "selfish" motivation that benefits both yourself and the world. :)

I definitely agree that starting small is best--it's much easier to write something when you're only doing it a couple of sentences at a time.

A few years ago (before the creation of hackaday.io et al) I created a site named Labradoc intended to make it easier to create project logs like those you describe. Of course, I had grand visions of providing a service to other developers/makers/hackers but we're all too cheap to pay. ;) So, mostly it's just for me and enjoys from some retro 2011 styling. :D

Here's my list of projects: http://labradoc.com/i/follower

A representative example: www.labradoc.com/.../project-sms-text-scroller

And a more developed than normal example: www.labradoc.com/.../notes-esp8266

You've covered the points--both motivations and fears--well. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.