I've been doing pretty much nothing else at work other than writing design and functional specifications at work so far this year. It is annoying, awkward, nit-picky and not particularly fun. It is even more awkward when you consider that the only people to review it are my few peers at this company who generally don't have many suggestions to improve what I do. In the end it feels like a pointless waste of time but has to be done just in case someone needs to refer to the documentation later.
Even writing this blog post is easier than writing technical specifications. They have to be exactly right otherwise they are useless and in the world of writing code some things can be extremely fluid. Coding is not an exact science. There are proven methods and ways to do things but knowing when and how to do these things is more of an art form. Having those moving, not always exact, functional pieces of code described in a permanent document is hard. I try to put just enough to understand what needs to be done without making it such that a monkey could sit down and write the code since what is the point of doing the document in that case?
Still, they are all done now. Just need to get them reviewed and approved. In the mean time I'll be coding what they describe and hopefully won't need to change too much.
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