Christopher Justice · Technology
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
A confession from someone who reverse engineers software for fun — and built a private family legacy platform because the big ones were going to fail my family eventually.
## I Don't Need Source Code. I Need Your Help Documentation.
A confession from someone who reverse engineers software for fun.....and built a private family legacy platform because the big ones were going to fail my family eventually.
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There is a certain kind of person who reads help documentation the way other people read novels.
Not because they're stuck. Not because something broke. They read it because help documentation is a confession. It's the company telling you, in careful, liability-aware language, exactly what the product can and cannot do, what it was designed to assume about you, and where the walls are. Read enough of it and you stop seeing a support article. You start seeing the architecture. The decisions. The trade-offs the engineers made at 2 a.m. before a sprint review. The features that almost shipped. The ones that shipped broken and got quietly buried three versions later.
Give me your help docs. I'll give you back a feature matrix.
Give me a feature matrix and enough time, and I'll build your product.
Not a copy. Something better. Something built for one specific use case that your product was never actually designed to serve.