== It's worth documenting the obvious (before it stops being obvious) I often feel a little bit silly when I write entries about things like [[making bar graphs in Grafana GrafanaMakeBarGraph]] or [[tags for Grafana dashboard variables GrafanaVariableGroups]] because when I write them up it's all pretty straightforward and even obvious. This is an illusion. It's all straightforward and obvious to me right now because I've been in the middle of doing this with Grafana, and so I have a lot of context and contextual knowledge. Not only do I know how to do things, I also know what they're called and roughly where to find information about them in Grafana's official documentation. All of this is going to fade away over time, as I stop making and updating our Grafana dashboards. Writing down these obvious things has two uses. First and foremost, I'll have specific documentation for when I want to do this again in six months or a year or whatever (provided that I can remember that I wrote some entries on this and that I haven't left out crucial context, [[which I've done in the past DocumentationAssumptions]]). Second, actually writing down my own documentation forces me to understand things more thoroughly and hopefully helps fix them more solidly in my mind, so perhaps I won't even need my entries (or at least not need them so soon). There's a lot of obvious things and obvious context that we don't document explicitly (in [[our worklog system WhyWorklogsWorkForUs]] or otherwise), which [[I've noticed before WorklogsAssumeContext]]. Some of those obvious things don't really need to be documented because we do them all of the time, but I'm sure there's other things I'm dealing with right now that I won't be in six months. And even for the things that we do all the time, maybe it wouldn't hurt to explicitly write them up once (or every so often, or at least re-check the standard 'how we do X' documentation every so often). (Also, just because we do something all the time right now doesn't mean we always will. What we do routinely can shift over time, and we won't even necessarily directly notice the shift; it may just slowly be more and more of this and less of that. Or perhaps we'll introduce a system that automates a lot of something we used to do by hand.) The other side of this, and part of why I'm writing this entry, is that I shouldn't feel silly about documenting the obvious, or at least I shouldn't let that feeling stop me from doing it. There's value in doing it even if the obvious remains obvious to me, and I should keep on doing a certain amount of it. (Telling myself not to feel things is probably mostly futile. Humans are not rational robots, no matter how much we tell ourselves that we are.)