Something that I'm disproportionately proud of is that my contributions to open source software are a few minor documentation improvements. One of those times, the docs were wrong and it took me ages to figure out how to do the thing I was trying to do. After I solved it, I was annoyed at the documentation being wrong, and fixed it before submitting a pull request.

I've not yet made any code contributions to open source, but there have been a few people on Lemmy who helped me to realise I shouldn't diminish my contribution because good documentation is essential, but often neglected.

[–] mad_lentil@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

The fact that documentation and comments can't "fail" if the underlying code changes is a real problem. I've even worked at places which dictated that comments had to go directly above or even beside (inline) with the code they were explaining, so they would show up in any patches changing the code.

What do you think happened? Yup, people would change code and leave the outdated (and wrong) comment untouched, directly to the right of the code they just changed.

Hell, I was one of those people, so I get how it can happen.