The Audience I Didn't Know I Had — Part Two
When I leave a software project, I want the next person to be able to take it over without needing me in the room.
Sometimes that next person is another engineer. Sometimes it is someone joining the team, a client receiving a handoff, or a developer inheriting a repository they did not choose. Sometimes it is me, six months later, staring at a decision I apparently made for a very good reason and having absolutely no memory of what that reason was.
That is the documentation habit I have been building for most of my career. It is not just “write a README.” It is trying to leave an explicit path into a project: how to start it, how it is shaped, what decisions were made, what someone should be wary of, and enough of the current understanding that the next person can safely take the next action.
The habit became systematic for me in 2012, at an EHR startup that was growing quickly. We went from four developers to forty in only a few years. For a SaaS company, that kind of growth does not happen by accident, and it was not only a headcount problem. The product was growing too: more applications, more repositories, more experiments, and more ways for context to get stranded with the person who happened to create it.
