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infectotoday at 2:17 PM5 repliesview on HN

That’s my experience with any of the 3 hyperscalers when reading docs. Millions of versions, blog posts and just overall massive challenge to get to the root of it. Funny the one thing I was always able to immediately and quickly digest, AWS Textract because they have a great python library with the kind of documentation I expect from a python project.


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mixedbittoday at 2:49 PM

My experience with Boto: need some S3 manipulation logic, here is an official documentation that shows how to solve the exact problem with Boto, one caveat, this version of Boto is deprecated. Do the same with the newest version? Not possible.

sandeepkdtoday at 4:39 PM

I do not really want to defend any of the companies here but the reality is that documentation is always a thankless job. People do it to get their project out there, get limelight and move on. There is not much incentive for the teams to manage the documentation actively unless the its a business priority.

I am myself in the IDP business, was trying to understand the pain points of the user. Even though I am not big fan of AWS but I find that the concerns are baked into the hope that using an IDP would some how make is very easy

> Flexibility of doing local development while on plane

Really depends what you are expecting from the IDP but personally this is one off situation and in most cases its not worth solving. We are in such a interconnected or dependent state where local development without internet is really hard.

> Configuration issue

The features of a solution are two edged sword, it provides people options to tailor it for their own use case and yet at the same time it adds to the learning curve. Good default might have been useful here, however it looks like Author only wanted email and nothing else so it was a departure from defaults

> UI customization

A lot of providers allow some flexibility with the UI but not a whole lot. And then some allow you to host on your website and call the API's for the authentication flows using SDK. Personally this one is tricky, its a UX vs security topic. As a thumb rule never trust the client. The request headers and ability to interact with browsers are what provides you with relatively better state and session control. As an IDP provider I do not want to loose that and still be on the hook for security.

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disgruntledphd2today at 2:29 PM

> That’s my experience with any of the 3 hyperscalers when reading docs.

I used to hate the AWS docs, now I use Azure and I hate that so much more. At least AWS had loads of (bad) docs that you could string together to figure out how to do something. With Azure, there's just no docs (except for bad videos), and they literally tell you (at the top of every page) that you can do this with AI (I know I can do it with AI, but I'd prefer if I could read your docs to make sure the machine isn't doing something dumb).

My expectation is that I'll end up on GCP in a few years, and that will be bad in hilariously different ways.

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automatic6131today at 2:19 PM

Documentation clearly following Conway's law: shipping the org chart.

mlinharestoday at 2:38 PM

No one gets promoted for writing good docs.

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