Internal documentation engineers will actually maintain

Documentation fails when it is separate from the workflow. The best docs are short, owned, and updated when behavior changes—not a quarterly wiki cleanup nobody believes in.

Runbooks for real incidents

We template runbooks around symptoms: what to check first, safe mitigations, escalation paths, and “when to stop and page someone else.” That keeps on-call calm when minutes matter.

ADRs for irreversible choices

Architecture decision records capture context: the problem, options considered, and why you chose what you did. Six months later, nobody has to reverse-engineer a Slack thread to understand constraints.

READMEs that match reality

Service READMEs should answer: how to run locally, required env vars, how to deploy, and where logs live. If that drifts, we treat it like a bug—because for new hires, it is.