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First rant here. Long, but please bear with me:

So after slogging my ass off in various early stage startups for over 4 years and keeping up with the almost non-existent development process, I joined an organisation which has some of the brightest and smartest minds I have had the pleasure to work with.

Mind you, this company is the market leader in it's field and has a 50+ people in it's tech team and the quality of work is pretty impressive.

Now for this week's sprint, I was asked to develop a feature which already exists on the Android app and they want to introduce in the iOS app too. The backend APIs are all in place and all I need to do is build it with virtually no dependency. My PM asks me to start with the UI and ask the backend dev for the API list whenever I need them.This is where the story turns.

For my first API, I go to the backend dev and ask him to share the API documentation and he looks at me as if I have asked him to dance the fucking cha cha. With a straight face he tells me that, 'The organisation doesn't maintain any kind of documentation for it's APIs.' Now this really shocks me. Even in a 5 men tech teams I have worked on, we have always maintained a spec doc for the APIs and this is a company which is known for it's tech practices.

Being the new guy I compose myself and ask if they have anything for me here: Postman collection, a workflowy doc, a goddamn txt file; anything which might help me, and he laughs at my dilusion and says no.

Dejected, I ask for a way to get the APIs and I am told that there are only two ways: either I keep bothering the Android dev for the APIs(No, I don't have the access to the android repo and nor am I gonna get it) which he had worked on 4 months back or I install the prod app on my phone, and use Charles to get every fucking API which is really, really annoying.

I thought writing out this rant would make me feel better, turns out it just made me angrier. Why the fuck can't they document such an important thing!?

Comments
  • 7
    They're not going to be leaders in industry for long if they don't document
  • 3
    @dirak I hope they start documenting but their product has already captured a huge market share and the competition is bare minimum.

    Their other operations are in good condition. It's just this documentation bit which sucks. I really need to ask the CTO why are they allowing this.
  • 3
    I feel your pain. I started in January this year as a working student for a consulting firm. They make their own software they use to make their own business models. This software is what I'm working it. It has a fucking million lines of code! And no God damn line of documentation.
    Getting better at reading code though.
  • 3
    @niennonno
    Then the easiest way of showing them that Documentation makes everything easier, is to Start Documentation yourself, everything you find out document even if it sounds unnecessary sb will find it usefull and maybe maybe they are going to document too.
  • 7
    I'd go ever further and insist on a self-documenting API, otherwise the documentation would be forever out of date.
  • 2
    @brahn I wish I can pitch this but this would mean extra work for the team and my request will be shot down.
  • 3
    @2xCmet Yes! I have started documenting my code and am putting comments all round my project. If the new iOS guy doesn't thank me after seeing such well-documented project, I might just punch him in the face.
  • 3
    Get the android app, use wireshark to capture the api calls, document them and also precicely note down how long it took you. At the next sprint planing show your results and how much time you had to "waste" as there weren't any docs.
  • 3
    Ok suggest to use flutter in the future to have both android and ios on the same codebase with the same features.
  • 3
    @Wack I just use Packet Capture app... It's a how I reverse engineered the devRant API :)
  • 2
    You should probably ask the Android guy. If he's a good dev, all the API calls would be in separate class that is responsible for making API calls so essentially it is self documenting.
  • 1
    do they have unit tests? doc IS always out of sync. I personally attach little value to doc and more to self explaining code.
  • 0
    @deviloper This. Would love to ++ it more
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