This 10,000 times. And it’s not just Rails, the quality of the Rails documentation made an impact on the Ruby community that was generally replicated. Compare that to the JavaScript world where cornerstone, insanely popular libraries will have documentation that covers roughly 10% of a library’s API surface area and maybe one simple example that doesn’t cover production use cases. And dozens of out of date Medium blogs.

I don’t understand how people operate like this day-to-day either guessing at APIs or having to dig through large, complex open source codebases just to figure out basic library functionality.

Maybe it’s my conception of how things should work that’s off, because I’ve met developers who actually enjoyed guessing at library APIs and said they don’t like reading documentation. I hoped they were the reckless fringe minority. Maybe they are actually the majority?

I worked so much faster in Rails. The community made that possible by writing well about how their libraries were meant to be used. And if anyone’s response is “well you should read your open source dependencies’s code anyway,” many times I did have to jump into the code of Ruby libraries and it was a lot easier to read the codebase when the library APIs were well documented, providing a context for understanding. I miss Ruby and Rails.