Between work and side projects, I've been engaging extensively with documentation. For a long time, documentation and the process of creating it felt like a necessary "evil," something appended after the fun part of a project. Something to endure and find relief in finishing. But as I've built and utilized documentation, I've come to deeply respect it and have even begun, at times, to prefer the process of documentation over its associated engineering, coding, and development.

Documentation manifests in many forms. Sometimes we write it in parallel with development, while other times it comes after. For some, it might even come before. Or, usually, it's some combination of these. Effective documentation can often make the difference between a successful product and a failure. But it can also extend beyond products and apply to anything from technical processes to design systems.

Documenting doesn't only help your users; it helps you validate your work, refine processes, and surface underlying issues.

It's important to consider the structure of information when documenting. Documentation is a form of organizational memory—the knowledge and experience that an organization has gained over time—which serves to keep yourself and those in your organization from repeating tasks, conversations, and work. It's essential to maintain effective documentation because it helps us move forward on a productive and informed trajectory. The structure of documentation is critical to its effectiveness within an organization. To produce effective documentation, a balance must be struck among precision, accuracy, conciseness, and form. Numerous resources are available to reference specifics related to a given field or project, so to keep this post brief, here are a few key takeaways to consider when producing documentation:

• Iterative and consistent: Documentation should often adapt to changing conditions in the development cycle. Flexibility, iteration, and consistency will yield better documentation.
• Quality over quantity: Verbose documentation is unnecessary. The quality of documentation is much more important than its length or quantity.
• Maintain focus: Documentation should efficiently communicate relevant information and avoid straying from its intended purpose. Defining a clear and concise focus for your documentation at the outset is helpful for tracking progress and maintaining scope.
• Understand your audience: Understanding the documentation's audience will inform its structure, design, level of detail, and many other aspects of its development.

Here are some resources I've used to guide my documentation processes:

Kitty Giraudel's Blog Post - "Technical documentation for everyone"

Ben Mullins on Medium - "Documentation: Writing it is the Worst, Having it is the Best"

Brad Frost's Blog Post - "How much documentation to include in a style guide?"

Nielson Norman Group - Documentation Articles

Google developer documentation style guide

Cedar - REI's Design System

I recently migrated my personal site from Hugo to Lume, the fast and flexible static site generator for Deno! As I'm not a very active publisher, it was quite easy to port my small collection of old blog posts to the new site, as they were initially authored in Markdown with relatively consistent metadata. Using Lume's handy _data feature, which allows you to specify data that should be applied to all files in a directory, I was able to get things set up and organized with ease. This migration has prompted me to think about data longevity and how consistent file structures aid tremendously in the long term. For now, I'm very excited to have my personal site running on Lume. In fact, I was an early Lume adopter, likely among its first users. I've used it extensively to document processes at work. It's too bad it took me this long to port over my personal site. Thanks to Lume, and especially its author, Óscar Otero, I have a fast blog built with an awesome tool! The current base template for this site is, in fact, an official Lume theme!

In 2004, Google bought Keyhole Corp., a CIA-funded digital mapping company. Previously, media entities had used Keyhole to visually map and broadcast areas of Iran in conflict reports. Recognizing the software's potential, Google set to work in lowering its usage price by about 40% and expanding its data sets. In 2015 Google Earth Pro became free, providing advanced tools for things like high-resolution graphic output, demographic overlays/projections, and animations. Google earth – more specifically Earth Engine – is now an invaluable asset to researchers leveraging its APIs. Petabytes of available data have yielded some detailed and important research, like this study on high-resolution mapping of global surface water and its long-term changes that appeared in Nature in 2016. Scientific applications like this are important and admirable, but it's also great to simply zoom around the virtual globe, make animations, and play around.

Google Earth Studio has been developed for animating geospatial information to create still and video content. This dedicated app now exists to keyframe Google Earth viewport movements and create animations at a variety of frame rates & resolutions. The project is currently available as an in-browser preview, essentially a 'beta.' Users must access through a Chrome browser (like Canary), hold a google account, and request access via form submission on the Google Earth Studio website. 3D data on Google Earth has become increasingly accurate, especially in densely populated areas with large structures. As one may presume, popular landmarks like the the Eiffel Tower are modeled with a high precision. But what about the rundown Philadelphia Electric Company building?

Republic Plaza, Denver, CO.

Apple Park, Menlo, CA.

Sources:

"Google Acquires Keyhole" – The Wall Street Journal

Google Earth Studio – FAQ

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An Earth Studio Irregularity

I manually specified a negative altitude in the animation studio. Looking up at the underside of the texture mapped to the planet's surface, many lines from the bases of 3D structures comprising Denver's virtual model were masked, producing a scene reminiscent of shattered glass. I exported a still for manipulation, pictured below among other graphics designed from Google Earth scenes.