In this presentation i will look at the work made across the 2 years to reflect on how it changed my understanding of code documentation.
# Ok time to wrap it up
Code documentation intended as a rich set of practices: comments in code, readme files, tutorials, guides, references etc., but also moments of collective learning, workshops, pair programming and collaborative documenting
In this presentation i will look at the work made across the 2 years to reflect on how it changed my understanding of programming and code documentation.
These aspects are usually marginal in software development: byproducts surroinding the real thing, extra and treats not always available in the scarce economies around documentation.
Code documentation here is intended as a rich set of practices: comments in code, readme files, tutorials, guides, references etc., but also moments of collective learning, workshops, pair programming and collaborative writing.
These aspects are usually marginal in software development: byproducts surroinding the real thing, extra work, and resources often not available in the scarce economy around documentation.
I would like to focus on these marginal zones, bring them to the center and explore how do they influence practices of programming & sociality around software development.
The required awesome list of things done during these two years is left in the background.
The institutional required list of things done during these two years is left in the background, squeeze your eyes and move the cursor to the edges to have a better focus.
<!-- AAAAH i can put it as a blurred background ahaha amazing -->
## your thesis (only a brief overview for context, as this has been assessed separately in depth),
## Brief thesis overview for context
Excerpts from [Hello Worlding: code documentation as entry point / backdoor to programming practices](https://hub.xpub.nl/soupboat/~kamo/thesis/)
Excerpts from [Hello Worlding](https://hub.xpub.nl/soupboat/~kamo/thesis/)
> Code documentation is an ideal publishing surface to create worlds around software, and to orientate software in the world.
> The nature of code documentation is to create entry points for people to participate in programming practices. To encode and filter knowledge, and ultimately to share it with others. This "nature", however, does not come without issues. It makes a lot of assumptions about who's reading, expecting experts, or engineers, or dudes. Its language is unwelcoming: too dense, too technical, very gendered and unable to address anyone but the neurotypical-white-cis-male programmer. Documentation requires an enormous amount of care, energy and time to be maintained, and it's done always out of budget, always as a side project, always at the end, and only if there's time left.
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> The nature of code documentation is __to create entry points for people to participate in programming practices__. To encode and filter knowledge, and ultimately to share it with others. This "nature", however, does not come without issues. __It makes a lot of assumptions about who's reading__, expecting experts, or engineers, or dudes. Its language is unwelcoming: too dense, too technical, very gendered and unable to address anyone but the neurotypical-white-cis-male programmer. __Documentation requires an enormous amount of care, energy and time to be maintained, and it's done always out of budget, always as a side project, always at the end, and only if there's time left__.
> Even if it does a questionable job at creating entry points, code documentation still has a lot of __potential as a backdoor__. It's a publishing surface whose reach extends through time and space. Time because it meets programmers at different moments in their lives: **from the _hello world_ till the _how to uninstall_**, and it influences thinking about software continuously, and from different perspectives. Space because it comes in many different possible formats, and can shapeshift to serve different occasions: from simple .txt files to entire websites, from coding workshops to comments in the source code to series of video tutorial. The question then becomes: can we make use of these backdoors to infiltrate programming practices and open more entry points from within?
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> Even if it does a questionable job at creating entry points, code documentation still has a lot of potential as a backdoor. It's a publishing surface whose reach extends through time and space. Time because it meets programmers at different moments in their lives: from the _hello world_ till the _how to uninstall_, and it influences thinking about software continuously, and from different perspectives. Space because it comes in many different possible formats, and can shapeshift to serve different occasions: from simple .txt files to entire websites, from coding workshops to comments in the source code to series of video tutorial. The question then becomes: can we make use of these backdoors to infiltrate programming practices and open more entry points from within?
> I started this research for of two reasons. The first is that I love programming because is like learning another language: not just a new bag of words and a different grammar, but a whole new way of thinking, a lens through which to look at the world. Coding means __to express ideas with the reduced vocabulary of a programming language.__ As in poetry, these constraints stimulate creativity, and encourage a diligent yet playful approach. Working with different programming languages and on different systems __transforms thinking in multivarious ways__, and that is extremely exciting.
> I started this research for of two reasons. The first is that I love programming because is like learning another language: not just a new bag of words and a different grammar, but a whole new way of thinking, a lens through which to look at the world. Coding means to express ideas with the reduced vocabulary of a programming language. As in poetry, these constraints stimulate creativity, and encourage a diligent yet playful approach. Working with different programming languages and on different systems transforms thinking in multivarious ways, and that is extremely exciting.
> The second reason is that I want to __share this excitement with others__, especially with my friends. __To be able to think and make sense together of what's happening around us, and come up with alternatives or responses or tools that suit us better.__ Because of the steep learning curve of programming and the other barriers previously mentioned, this has often not been possible. But now we know that there are other ways in, and that it is possible to open up even more.
> The second reason is that I want to share this excitement with others, especially with my friends. To be able to think and make sense together of what's happening around us, and come up with alternatives or responses or tools that suit us better. Because of the steep learning curve of programming and the other barriers previously mentioned, this has often not been possible. But now we know that there are other ways in, and that it is possible to open up even more.
## your individual contributions to the special issues,
Ahah what do we even mean by _"individual"_?
Note that every special issue is a wild ecosystem of things happening at the same time: some of them have the brief lifespan of a cactus flower, some of them reach the public, some others remain in the background, some are subtle gestures, some crazy dangerous proposal.
