Ask HN: How viable is this idea?

It's a great idea. You would need to plan this carefully. Most senior devs probably couldn't effectively communicate all those points without a pre-crafted plan. Effectively you would need to fuse technical writing skills with script writing skills. That on its own would be considerable value-add.

this, i doubt majority of people are good at teaching...

Unless you tied it to the exact areas of the codebase somehow, finding specific information about the code in video form would be hard.

Plus, for myself, I don't know how many times I've seen a piece of cryptic code written by some prodigy who left the company years ago. It would take a lot of effort to get documentation around these scenarios.

Instead, it would be easier to get a company to get on board with adopting proactive documentation practices. This doesn't necessarily mean explicitly writing technical documentation, either. It can be implicit.

Some companies that I worked for in the past would have policies around how work would be completed. A big thing they did would ensure that all of our work had tickets associated with them and that all branches were named after the tickets. This made it trivial to blame a line of code and start digging into not just who made it or when, but also why. I could see what other tickets were related to it to find out a lot of valuable contextual information, sometimes even for code that was implemented years before I showed up.

I wrote a set of PPTX to induct new hires into our core concepts, values, specific language uses. It helped a lot with a bunch of recent "what do you guys mean"

I talk them. It hadn't occurred to me, to video the talk that goes with them, but that actually makes sense

yea, but i was thinking you could hire a company that would basically keep your code video documented

huge initial startup cost to the data dictionary specific to the enterprise, the ontology of language unique to the context. I am unsure people would be willing to pay for that.

That said, the consultancy to narrow down meaning of terms of art, is I think immensely valuable.

In our org we have video tutorial for env setup, how to use tools etc. Used to use native video recorder + notion. Now we use https://www.letsflyby.com/. It's a general purpose recording and annotation tool (which helps bookmarking a section of the video of the codebase).

iirc there’s an extension for a VS code that facilitates this kind of a thing. ie, it doesn’t do what you are talking about, but it would allow you to record a code walk-through, complete with audio and I think a screen recording or something like that.

One way to partially test the viability of your idea is to see who is using this tool and how, or other tools like it

is this it https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vsls-con...

Yes, that’s the one I was thinking of!

Cool, I didnt know that.

The main argument I hear against extensive documentation is that the codebase changes too quickly to make it worth the effort. I cannot see video as being any better in this regard - it takes more effort to create and more time to consume. Seems like it would be a large effort just to get around the concern of asking quick questions remotely.

It takes less effort and time than explaining it everytime a dev joins.

We've had some videos on some teams. It works well for stuff that doesn't change often, like high level onboarding.

also devs tend to specialize into different parts of the codebase and if you end up working in territory which you are not familiar it'd be cool to get quick run down what is going on here.

I agree. On my team I'm expected to be full stack for two different stacks (with the exception of legacy mainframe). Plus I'm the Tableau guy for our team. There was very little documentation. I've been a le to add some. But I don't really see how I can become an expert in all those technologies if I am constantly working with different ones.

Not exactly the same, but https://paircast.io/ is in the same vein.

There was a product listed on HN a while ago that tackled the problem with the solution you described. I can't remember what it's called though...

i'd love to take a look, i'm actually more interested in product then actually building it

CodeTour?

This is the age old question of how do you keep the docs up to date with the code.