Everything survived. Except the explanation.
A while ago I was trying to understand why one of our services used Redis.
Finding the artifacts wasn't difficult.
There was a Jira ticket.
A pull request.
An architecture document.
A Slack discussion.
A commit.
Nothing had been deleted.
Everything was searchable.
And yet I still couldn't answer a simple question:
Why Redis?
Every file answered a different question
The Jira ticket answered:
What changed?
The pull request answered:
How was it implemented?
The architecture document answered:
Where does it fit?
The Slack thread answered:
Who was involved?
The commit answered:
When did it happen?
But none of them answered the question I actually had.
Why.
The answer wasn't missing
It just wasn't stored in one place.
Part of it lived in a security review.
Part in a design discussion.
Part in a Slack thread.
Part in the implementation.
Individually, every document made sense.
Collectively, they explained the decision.
The answer wasn't inside any single document.
It emerged from the relationships between documents.
That's when something started bothering me
We spend enormous effort preserving documents.
Git preserves commits.
Confluence preserves pages.
Jira preserves tickets.
Slack preserves messages.
Backups preserve all of them.
But none of these systems preserve the fact that one artifact exists because of another.
That relationship usually lives only in people's heads.
Once those people leave, every document survives.
The explanation doesn't.
I realized I had been asking the wrong question
I used to ask:
Did we document this?
Now I ask:
If someone finds this document a year from now, will they know what other documents they need to understand it?
Those are different questions.
The first is about documentation.
The second is about memory.
Documents aren't the whole memory
A document can survive forever.
That doesn't mean its meaning survives.
Meaning is often distributed across decisions, conversations, reviews, commits, and documentation.
I know how to preserve each of those individually.
I'm no longer convinced that's enough.
Documents preserve what happened.
Relationships preserve why it happened.
Next time: why I eventually stopped thinking of documents as the primary thing to index — and started thinking about decisions instead.
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