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Comment by hyperpallium2 | Hacker News Reader

A problem I experienced with this is future-me is another user. So some aspects of documentation, ease of use etc became more important. Of course, that's my decision whether to support future-me or not, so is consistent with your philosophy. But it's quite difficult if I do, to know how much, and what exactly, is really needed... because, well, I can't google for it.

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This. In school I was taught: “in class, you learn the lesson then you get the test. In life, you get the test then you learn the lesson.”

This parent-comment musings drive home the importance of documentation, or complete project management. You’ll feel it viscerally and whatever the experience, you’re responsible for it.

Yep. My personal projects are documented as if I had to hand them over. It's partly because I like writing documentation, and partly because I really enjoy those readmes and comments later.

> Of course, that's my decision whether to support future-me or not

What a great phrase, I'm going to remember it next project do. I get angry at past-me sometimes for the gibberish he wrote.

I was reminded of this thread while reading this Unix Koan:

http://www.catb.org/~esr//writings/unix-koans/prodigy.html

I've found that learning to empathize with future-me, also made me better at writing code that others want to read. Kind of like dogfooding.

I made a commandline tool that shows my APIs "from outside": what is public; do names make sense from that point of view; can you see the basic use/idea?

NB: (1) I made easy improvements it indicated, but not hard ones. (2) the tool itself is super-hacky.., partly my philosophy to impl once to understand the problem, once to solve it (because there's no point designing "the right" solution before you've encountered the whole problem - and I haven't yet.)

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