Do you wake up in a cold sweat when you think about what would happen if one of your devops people were to suddenly vanish, or win the lottery? Could you carry on? Can anyone on your team take vacations to cell-phone dead spots? Devops is such a dynamic and flexible part of an organization that it is the absolute hardest thing to get documented, and the place where it really makes a difference to burnout if you have managed the miracle.

Devops is almost always responsible for documenting their own stuff, and frequently they are moving so quickly that this step gets shortcut or omitted. I want to give people in devops some simple, straightforward, repeatable, testable tools to make sure that all the mission-critical data is not dependent on one person or role.

We’re going to have to do much more nimble, flexible documentation methods than remembering to enter things in Confluence. I’m going to use post-its, commit messages, slack emojis, and crowd suggestions to show you how to do good-enough documentation without slowing your organization down.