 Alright, who here has made a comment to themselves as they were coding within the code itself? You might have a few reasons for this. You could have copy pasted a section from Stack Overflow, and what does it do again? You may have made a choice, and why did you do that? But when you made that comment, were you thinking you were making documentation? Engineers know to make the docs they need, but sometimes newbies are told that to be a real programmer, their code needs to be dry. We're told the codes who speak first call it self comments fraud, and comments mean time tree factor. These comments as docs have different benefits in long form docs. They can summarize the purpose of a particular file, describe functions in place, give the why, and lower cognitive load. With all these reasons to use in code comments, we may be wondering why we aren't using them everywhere, but what's the problem with that? The first time I tried web scraping I had to do lists, non-working code, and notes expressing confusion. Red arrow points to my favorite comment of all time, oh it's a list, thank God. Why would you contribute to this? I feel confused just looking at it now, and I wrote it. There are a lot of variation in best practices for comments. We can all agree that comments, if used properly, can be an invaluable part of a code based. A lot of people feel that no comment means bad code, but I expect, oh here it is. But no comment can mean bad code, but this might also be true. So when are we just labeling our cats, and when are our comments useful? The internet, of course, has some advice. So we've all seen the Stack Overflow newbie smackdown, right? The advice, refactor, don't use comments. Use only the right comments, only your code matters. Ah, thank you internet people. Sometimes the response to someone's thoughtful question is, this has been discussed to death. We forget how much new programmers are taking on when we put them down for asking about best practices. How dare they? All this best use talk is important, but let's go back and remember when we were first writing our first lines of code and encountered the power of the comment. Some newbies throw them everywhere to support their learning. So what happens when we tell newbies to hide their learning process? I wanted to show you an example of my earliest comments, but none of them exist. I was told that to be taken seriously as a developer, I could only commit my cleanest code. So the next time I saw someone being told their commenting style was an anti-pattern, I couldn't let it go. A lot of people online claim their code has always been dry. We are all perfect coding robots, or we are fooling ourselves. Time for a survey. I asked many questions, essentially, are comments good? Or what about clean code being king? It's clear comments remind us what code does clarify thinking and save dev times. We're pretty positive about comments, but when we ask, is clean code self-documenting the results spread out with no agreement? We have internalized this despite the usefulness of comments. People care a lot about this topic. In their written answers, they wrote tomes and expressed a variety of viewpoints. No surprise since they're experienced ranges from one month to 30 years and they use a variety of languages. So remember that jerk who convinced me to erase my comments? You'll be happy to know that I'm probably the only one of these folks who have to go through this. 78% of my respondents disagree with this practice. A whole lot of people, a whole lot of people, 60% use inline comments despite our collective shame about the practice. And 63% of us use comments to explore new ideas. So comments are part of the code that we produce. And the fact that we produce them offers us lessons about how we learn, collaborate, and create. How we support new learners and their future documentation habits or not support new learners and their future documentation habits tells us a lot about the gap we may have in our model of the usefulness of what can be a big support for devs. Best practices have a lot of confusion and do as I say, not as I do. It's important that we don't, that we remember our overwhelmed learner. If you start to think about comments as an early form of documentation, should we better define our best practices and create tooling to address the legitimate concerns of comment rot? So the bottom line, let's stop putting down people who have ideas different than ours. PS, who thinks this is some oxygen documentation right here? That was a long 15 seconds. So this is my contact interview. Thank you all for coming. If you want to share the survey with other folks, I have a link for you here and I'll be adding its Twitter soon. And if your company would like to hire a DevRel, we should be in touch because apparently I will try anything to get on stage.