Write Down Your Process, Your Memory Can Fail You

"A good documentation trail and good content will help you down the road with unexpected liability" - David Lewis

During our onboarding, there was a Git task we were given. I did the task excellently and I went on to do its advanced level task.

The first two days of this week, some of the tasks we did during onboarding, were repeated. The git task was one of them.?

On Tuesday, when I opened the intranet and saw what the task for the day was, I took it for granted and went on to continue my reading on Shell scripting. I assumed that since I had done the git task before, it would be a walkover.?

At about 3 pm, I decided to take a break from reading to do the task. I did the mandatory tasks successfully and moved on to the advanced ones. I did the first of the advanced task and went ahead to check my code. There's a checker that checks the code for every task. If the checker fails, it means the code was wrong and you'll have to redo the task. I clicked on the checker and reached out for a bottle of water with the assumption that my code will check. But alas! the checker failed, my code was wrong.

I assumed again that it was a minor error I had made somewhere. I went through my process, redid the task and checked again. Checker failed again. That was the beginning of a war between the task and me.

After the third attempt on the task failed, I went on to check the task replica I had done previously. I saw the evidence of having written the codes correctly but I didn't write down the process then and so couldn't refer to it to check what I was doing wrong now.

I struggled with that task till about 11 pm when I eventually knew I needed help with it. So I reached out to my study buddy. He is a selfless, gracious soul, always ready to help.?

After narrating my ordeal to him, he too took it for granted and assumed that the issue must be a minor error that we'll resolve in no time. We went through the whole process together and did all we knew to do. But my checker kept failing. At about 2 am, I thanked him and told him that I'll just leave the task since it was an advanced task and optional in the first place. He refused because it was a task we had done before and so we should be able to resolve the issue.

We went back and forth, started the task all over and checked every step of the process but no way, the checker didn't bulge. Out of five checks, the third check kept failing.?

It was a Git/Github task; I would have deleted the repository to start the task all over but that will mean deleting all the other tasks I had done on the repository before then which will affect all my previous tasks and codes on that repository. That was a risk I was not prepared to take. At about 4:30 am, I had to insist that we let go of the task. Having spent over five hours with me on the task and having done all we knew to do, my buddy eventually agreed with me that we let go of the task.

I made up my mind to revisit the task sometime again to resolve it, but since then, we've been having study materials and tasks back-to-back, plus domestic and other responsibilities, that I haven't been able to. I might just leave the task to serve as a reminder that I should always document every coding process.

I read in passing somewhere before, that a developer should always write down his process to be able to refer to it anytime he needs to in future. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I learned first-hand the potency of that recommendation. Who would have guessed that a task would be repeated? I learnt a great lesson here, no process is too minor to take for granted, and no coding process is too simple to document especially as a learner just learning the skill.??

Another major challenge of the week is having so much to study and so many tasks to do within very limited time frames. I am beginning to understand why ALX's slogan is 'doing hard things'; the training method and curriculum will push you to either do hard things or check out. I signed up for this, and daily, I am getting toughened to do hard things!

Till I write to you again next week, always remember to document your process, you never know when you may need to refer to it.

Thank you for coming along with me on this journey, you are my real MVPs??.