RTFM (Read the Fu**ing Manual) Best Advice of My Life
It was a Saturday afternoon, sometime back in 2020.
A notification popped up in my email:
"Our production systems are down."
I quickly opened my laptop, started digging through the logs, and discovered that our API gateway had crashed.
The sales team was breathing down our necks—they had just launched a huge promotional campaign for the courses we sell on our edtech platform.
Users were dropping fast.
I quickly removed the API gateway from our stack and ran the application without rate limits.
The issue was resolved—at least for the moment.
My team took a deep breath, as if we had just avoided some kind of tsunami.
Then came the big question:
We were using a highly scalable API gateway.
How in the world could it crash?
We hadn’t battle-tested it, but we were confident that a popular open-source project backed by Google couldn’t be the root cause.
So, we dove in—trying to fix the problem.
We scoured Stack Overflow, GitHub issues, and anything that could help us get back up and running.
That’s when our COO stepped in.
He asked one simple question:
"Have you read the manual (Docs)?"
The team went silent.
No one had bothered to go through the documentation.
Why?
Because reading docs is often seen as a painful process—even though 100% of the answers to our problem lay right there.
He shouted again:
"Guys, I’ve told you hundreds of times — Read the Fu**king Manual!"
Before trying out something new.
We, as developers, often rely heavily on tutorials and shortcuts to learn a new technology.
As soon as something new drops, we rush to YouTube and start searching for tutorials.
What we forget is the one source of truth:
The Docs.
Every documentation contains everything you need to know:
- What the project is
- Why it was built
- The value it delivers
- How to use it
- Common pitfalls
- Edge cases
- Even features that are still in the pipeline
So now, whenever you want to build something new...