I’m going to say something that will make every engineering manager uncomfortable: Stop asking your team to write documentation . Not because documentation doesn’t matter. It matters more than ever. But because asking humans to document their work after they’ve done it is a process that has failed consistently for thirty years, and no amount of “definition of done” checklists or documentation sprints is going to fix it. The people who know the most write the least. The docs that get written are stale within weeks. And the knowledge that matters most — the decisions, the gotchas, the “why” behind the code — rarely makes it into a document because it’s not the kind of thing you sit down and write. The Documentation Death Spiral I’ve watched this cycle play out on every team I’ve been part of: Week 1: “We need to document this.” Everyone agrees. Someone creates a Confluence space. Week 4: A few pages exist. They’re pretty good. Written by the one person who cares about docs. Week...
LocalStack today announced it has extended its ability to simulate Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments to provide an ability to debug applications before deploying them. Company CEO Colin Neagle said App Inspector makes it possible for developers to debug their applications running in a simulated AWS environment inside a container on a local server. Simulating the full application stack within a local sandbox container makes it possible to better understand application behavior such as data flows between AWS services, event execution paths and resource dependencies that may have been inadvertently misconfigured, noted Neagle. Once discovered, App Inspector then generates a visual representation of the interaction between services in the local environment to make it simpler to debug applications without digging through logs and then needing to upload a fix to a staging server running in the AWS cloud. That capability doesn’t replace the need for an observability platform but i...