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My eleven tips for writing more useful systems documentation

A common complaint in most tech teams is that documentation is imcomplete, out of date and generaly the documentation that is there is useless.  Quite often you hear people say "old documentation is worse than non documentation at all," "we need more documentation," "we need less documentation," or even "the system should document itself."

The following is a few techniques I have found useful in the past for making sense of documentation.

Interesting links from 25th February 2009

At home sick today so caught up on some very dry reading.  A lot of old links here but interesting none the less if you are in to designing scalable platforms for hosting web applications.

• Scalable Linux Clusters with LVS, Part I - http://tag1consulting.com/Scalable_Linux_Clusters_with_LVS_Part_I
  Intro to using LVS for load balancing.
  
• Design Patterns - http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DesignPatterns
  Good reference for development documenting some handy "design patterns".
  
•  Network Design Patterns: N-Tier Data Centers - http://www.sun.com/blueprints/1003/817-3997.pdf
  A pdf from sun written a few years back talking about network design patterns for data centres.
  
• Network Naming Schemes - http://www.namingschemes.com/Main_Page
  For those stuck trying to think up an original naming scheme for their network.
  
• Domain Name Humor - http://www.domainhandbook.com/humor1.html
  Some light humour after all the dry material.
  
• RFC 1178 - Choosing a name for your computer - http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178
  There is even an RFC to help you name your computer.
  
• Gravatar - Globally Recognized Avatars - http://www.gravatar.com/
  Why not add gravatars to your software?