Documentation is a message in a bottle

Our company is going to a convention later this month, and they will have a booth with big TV screens showing statistics that update in real time. My job is to write the backend server that delivers the statistics. I read over the documents that the product people had written up about what was wanted, asked questions, got answers, and then turned the original two-line ticket into a three-page ticket that said what should be done and how. I intended to do the ticket myself, but it's good practice to write all this stuff down, for many reasons: Writing things down forces me to think them through carefully and realize what doesn't make sense or what I still don't understand. I forget things easily and this will keep the plan where I can find it. I might get sick, and if someone else has to pick up the project this might help them understand what I was doing. If my boss gets worried that all I do is post on 4chan all day, this is tangible work product that proves I did something else that…