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It's like levels of caching. Having information in someone's head is like having it in an L1/L2 cache. Having documentation is like having the information in RAM. And having no documentation and putting things together from scratch is like hitting a hard drive.

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That's an amazing similitude, I must note it down. I reckon the last bit could be even "got to fetch it from the network", since you'll likely have to hit Stack overflow..

To stretch out the metaphor, asking a knowledgeable coworker could be "read from RAM", then documentation could be "read from disk"; or vice versa. But I find having someone to bounce questions off of easier than reading docs

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