This is a story from the early, early days—I’m talking internship days at Telecel (a big deal company here in Ghana). To give you some context, Telecel itself is one of the top two internet providers for the whole country. However, they made a venture into fintech—yeah, let's call it fintech. Since they basically power people's phones, they opened up a new department for mobile money.
That's enough scene setting. Now I find myself in this large company working on the (you guessed it right) mobile money dev team. The more popular name for this was Telecel Cash. And my boss? He's a busy man. He knows he has to teach me and all, and to be fair he tries, but... he's not exactly there for me.
On top of that, he really trusts me. Boy, I do not know what they told him (I was moved from another office, but story for another day). So he just gives me these big projects to be doing. For example, I would do projects on DStv integrations so the TV service could have Telecel Cash as a payment option. I would design whole frontends and backends and have to integrate with the MPESA API.
Now here's where the life-saving comes in. The thing is, he trusts me that much, hell the whole company does, but at the time I wasn't quite there yet. And can you blame them? I guess not, because at the end of the day I would somehow pull it all off and fix all the errors too.
But we know all things come to an end (well, almost). So there's this particular project, and it's so big I can't even mention it. I think there was even an NDA, but big stuff. And of course, I as the intern get a chunk of responsibilities. This time though... a lot of things go wrong. Like, the code wouldn't even run, let alone get to the point of testing the endpoints in Postman. Missing imports that were right there... code words and errors that I didn't understand.
I ran to my boss, of course, and he's like, "Oh just look at the site where you downloaded the SDK." So I am on there not even really knowing what I am looking for, and then it dawns on me that it must definitely be the docs.
So I start reading it and reading it. And I now find out there's a kit for everyone's language. (You know how I write Python and all). All this while I was trying to hack it in C which I just "kinda knew." Also, all the dependencies you had to import had specific versions tied to them; for some the latest worked, and for some you would need to grab older versions. Turns out that particular project needed a whole different implementation.
I take all these problems one by one and I solve them. But this time when the boss finds out, he acts a little different. He's all like, "You actually did it." And as testimony to how impressed he was, I have recommendation letters and endorsements for all my trouble.
That's why I have a soft spot for documentation and always think it should be done right, especially if the project is of significance. I even looked into Mintlify yesterday, a tool that allows you to have the docs on the web. Very cool!!!!
Yeah, so that's how docs saved my life. Write good ones that save others too.
Top comments (1)
God knows the recommendations have done a lot for my career.