Documenting Work for the Next Practitioner

Imagine two practitioners who each finish a client engagement. Both produced useful pieces of work along the way: a data-handling routine, a configuration pattern, and a set of checks they wrote to confirm results. The first practitioner closes the project folder and moves on. The second spends an extra hour pulling the reusable pieces out of the project, tidying them up, and saving them where they can be found again.

This article explains why that extra hour matters. The source calls the collection of reusable parts a slice library, and it makes a sharp point about it: the library does not build itself. Someone has to decide to build it, and that decision has to be repeated after every piece of work.

The central claim of the source is that the library grows only through deliberate action. The FDE, at the end of every engagement, makes time to do three things. None of these steps happens automatically as a side effect of doing the project. Each one has to be chosen, which is why a library's size reflects how consistently the routine was followed rather than how much work was done.

The source also says that this discipline compounds. Each engagement that ends with an extracted, documented piece leaves the library slightly larger and easier to use, and those small additions accumulate over time. The benefit does not show up in any single engagement. It shows up in later ones.

Maintenance can be thought of as a short sequence that runs at the close of each engagement. The source names three actions in order: extracting the reusable parts into a clean template, writing the README for the next FDE, and adding the result to the catalog. The diagram below shows that sequence as a pipeline. It is a summary of the source's ordering rather than a separate procedure.

Read the pipeline as a chain of dependencies. The template is the raw material. The README is what makes that material usable by someone else. The catalog entry is what makes the finished piece findable at all. A template without a README can still exist, but the next FDE has no stated way to pick it up, which is the gap the source warns against.

The source gives the slice library a different job depending on who is working. For a solo operator or a small shop, it acts as a moat, a protective barrier that keeps the practice defended. For a larger team, it acts as a highway, the shared route along which work moves efficiently between people. The metaphors point to the same underlying asset, but they describe different ways of getting value from it.

Notice what the two roles have in common. In both cases the library is valuable only because it is kept in a usable state. A moat that has not been maintained does little to defend anything, and a highway with no signs or clear lanes does not move traffic well. The source makes this dependence explicit by saying that the library is vital in both settings and that maintaining it takes discipline.

Three artifacts work together. The template holds the reusable part itself. The README is the document that lets someone else pick up that part. The catalog entry is the record that makes the finished piece findable. The source says the README is what lets someone else pick up a part, and it treats skipping documentation as something that undermines the library even when the code itself is sound.

The map above reflects the order in which a practitioner meets these artifacts when looking for a slice. The catalog is consulted first, because it is what makes a finished piece findable at all. The README is read next to learn what the piece does and how to pick it up. The template is then the material that gets reused. The source does not give a separate procedure for this search, so treat the order as a practical reading of how the three artifacts depend on one another.