While working on this project, as well as other assignments in previous classes, the difficulty of each task is often completely based on the quality of the docs for whatever language/library I’m using. When taking Mobile Development for example, I was impressed by the quality of flutter’s docs and videos. They were easy to understand, and the setup docs gave step by step instructions for downloading an emulator, getting the right libraries and file structure. They were excellent.

I bring this up because despite kind of owning the entire world, Google’s cloud docs are some of the worst docs I’ve ever worked with in any of my classes. They aren’t the absolute worst. That honor goes to those man-pages for c our Operating Systems professor linked in each assignment. The cloud docs at least have examples of how functions are used, and those examples are in many different languages, but the instructions assume a level of knowledge that maybe is fine for someone familiar to cloud development, but I often had to go to outside sources to figure out how to do steps like, “pass the application credentials needed for your application”, or steps that were not updated since google clouds UI changed.

Again, if I knew anything about cloud development this wouldn’t be an issue, so it got me thinking, who should you make docs for? Because if it’s so anyone can use your platform, then I’d argue these docs fail. That’s a ridiculous notion though, because even with better setup instructions, I guarantee my grandma will never be able to use Google Cloud. So I guess at some point you have to pick some level of knowledge and assume everyone looking at your page has that level. Even in the C example I linked, it’s safe to assume that anyone coding in C is an absolute freak and possibly for them, the info given in those docs is enough.

I don’t have a real solution to any of this. I just think it’s interesting that even though I judge docs as good or bad based on my knowledge, I don’t really know who they decided these docs are for. Maybe almost everyone using Google Cloud has enough cloud development experience to make use of those docs. Still, the Flutter docs had cool videos with nice looking people, so they are the superior documentation.