Good documentation is in high demand everywhere, from coding libraries to products and services to even data science projects. The funny thing is that even though many people value communication in data science, not everyone can link good communication and good documentation. Interestingly, even if you are the most charismatic communicator out there, if you don't express your communication skills in your documentation, your data science work will suffer. But why is documentation so valuable? What about visuals? Aren't they worth (at least) 1000 words each? What's the point of dressing up our code notebooks with text too? First thing's first. You don't need to be a technical writer to write good documentation. Just take a look at the documentation of the most mature packages in Julia. Do you think their creators were technical writers? The same goes for other kinds of documentation available online. As long as the reader can understand what you are doing without having to dig deep into the code (or even worse, run parts of the code), your documentation is a decent first draft. That can later be improved, but first, you need to write it! Even if you are the only person to read this documentation, perhaps on a future iteration of that data science project, it's good to do it properly. This way, you won't scratch your head trying to figure out what you were thinking when you put that notebook together. Good documentation is not just about the reader, though. It's also about organizing your thoughts and understanding your code better. Perhaps some refactoring needs to take place, simplifying the whole project. Or maybe some examples could help clarify the objective or the value-add of your script. It's easy to lose sight of these matters when you are entrenched in analytics work, especially the coding part. A well-documented data science project can be a great addition to your portfolio (assuming, of course, that you have the option of exhibiting your work publicly). It's unlikely that someone will go through every line of your code to see what you've done. Still, that person may read at least parts of your documentation, especially the text at the beginning, where you explain the objectives, assumptions, and datasets related to this project. And you can be almost certain that if someone makes it to the end of your code notebook, they'll read your conclusions too. Documentation in data science may not seem as important a skill as knowledge of machine learning, data visualization, etc., but it's a powerful catalyst for all these. After all, just because you create a fancy visual, it doesn't mean that everything is fully comprehensible in it. Perhaps there is so much to see that you need to point the reader to the key findings, which they can then verify by looking closely at the plot. Although good code is self-explanatory, because of its structure and naming conventions, it's always useful to add some text around it. I'm not talking about some comments, but also stuff going beyond the code itself. After all, the code you write is not a work of art (even if you may think that at times!) but a means to an end. That end, along with how the code achieves that end, is something the reader of your code notebook shouldn't have to think about too much. It's better to make it easy for him through good documentation, allowing him to ponder on the whole project, rather than him having to spend all his time trying to figure out what you have done and why. I can go on about this topic until the cows come home. However, an attribute of good documentation is brevity, which is why I'll stop right here. If you find this material of value, you can check out my various books, where I talk about topics like this in more detail. Cheers!
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Zacharias Voulgaris, PhDPassionate data scientist with a foxy approach to technology, particularly related to A.I. Archives
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