Reflecting on my activities in the last few months (especially around Sling and how we use it), I notice that Developer Usability is often my concern.

How do we make our software more understandable, transparent, efficient and generally usable by developers? Good designs should be self-explaining, but in a complex system that's easier said than done.

There are many small things that influence this, as well as architectural decisions where one might trade off other criteria for developer usability.

I find it captivating to try and improve things so that people understand them better - I'll try to find out more about what makes the difference here, but for now I've made a few suggestions related to documenting Sling, which would hopefully apply to other projects as well.

(Update: see the next post for a more general view on those suggestions).

I'm starting to think that documentation is like code comments: if you need lots of it, that's a bad sign.

Feedback is welcome.

Picture by agathabrown, under morguefile license.