To really take an important role in practice, ideas need to get built into people’s heads. Since most practitioners don’t read much, they get most of their ideas from people they talk to, things they can read quickly, and most of all, from … practice.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to “spike” a map drawing program. We know nothing about maps or drawing, and very little about programming. How might we proceed?

Harald Mueller and I have been having a little mailing list debate about documentation. I’ve been taking the position that we want understanding, not documents. He’s been saying that documents are one good way to get understanding. So far, we haven’t gotten on the “same page” yet, but I trust that we will if we keep going. In the light of that conversation, though, here are some thoughts on documenting this little product we’re working on.