Does anybody really use the SDLC development method? It seems so.... in practical

Eventually you use it, without even thinking about it. Maybe you're overthinking it? What part seems impractical to you?

@emes001 mainly it's the amount of documentation, it seems inefficient

@magis Documentation is important. It's REALLY important, unless you don't expect your code to live for more than a year. When another dev needs to maintain or add a feature, without documentation, it'll take them twice as long and they're more likely to break stuff.

Ahh. When you take on clients, you'll be happy to have documentation. Mostly for what their expectations/requirements are, and pointing out when they're going off course. For personal projects, you're right, an over abundance of documentation isn't necessary. The larger the team/project, the more is necessary to keep people on the same page. Could you imagine a team of 40 having no documentation, someone new comes on, and they have to talk to everyone just to have a clue what's going on? Or instead, they can read documentation without bothering everyone else.

@emes001 My work has about 75 developers and little to no documentation. it is truly a nightmare at times

So is it documentation in the sense of, these guys are building this part, these other guys doing this part? That kind of style? Google couldn't really help me wrap my head around it.

See my lecturer, as always, just breezed over and just said it's a lot of hassle and seldom used so I was in two minds.