You’ve probably spent hours of your life staring at a Confluence page. You know the one. It has a sterile header, a rigid table of Jira ticket numbers, and a tone so aggressively neutral it could put a caffeinated squirrel to sleep. We’ve been taught that this is how professionals build software. We separate the human from the machine, scrubbing our personality from the architecture to keep things “efficient.”
But we’ve been lied to. Sterile documentation is a death sentence for innovation.
Back in 1996, a game designer named Tim Schafer was mapping out Grim Fandango. To keep the complex puzzle logic in check, he wrote a foundational puzzle dependency document. It was a strict, logical flowchart of mechanics—if the player picks up the scythe, they can open the door. Pure, dry, technical necessity.
Except, Schafer didn’t write it like a corporate drone. He wrote it like a human who was deeply, obsessively in love with the world he was building.
A flowchart tells you what to build. A creator’s voice tells you why it matters.
Instead of dry instructions, the document is filled with sarcasm, inside jokes, and unfiltered personality. At the very end of the schematic, Schafer included a small, drawn square with a note: “To protect this document, please restrict your fallen tears of joy to this box. Thank you!”
Modern software managers would look at that and scream about wasted time. Why spend hours injecting humor into a foundational logic tree? Why draw a tear-box on a schematic? Because that “wasted time” is the exact reason we are still talking about Grim Fandango nearly thirty years later.
When a tween found a discounted copy of the game in a bargain bin, they didn’t understand half the adult sarcasm. But they felt it. The art, the voice, the soul of the creator—it grabbed them and never let go. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because the creator’s chaotic, emotional voice bled directly into the mechanical architecture.
The magic isn’t in the code. It’s in the unprofessional, unfiltered humanity you leave behind in the margins.
We think our internal tools don’t matter. We treat them as disposable artifacts meant only for the next sprint. But when you strip the humanity out of your foundational tools, you strip the humanity out of the final product. You get a perfectly logical, perfectly forgettable piece of software.
We’ve optimized the soul out of our scaffolding, leaving behind nothing but sterile templates that no one remembers.
If you are building something, stop writing for the machine. Write for the human who will read your notes tomorrow. Take a side. Be provocative. Draw a box for their tears of joy. The paradox of great design is that the rigid logic tree only becomes enduring art when you let your unfiltered personality bleed all over it.
Stop building sterile products. The most dangerous thing you can do in tech right now is have a personality.
FAQ
Q: Doesn't injecting personality into technical docs just confuse developers and slow down execution?
A: If your team is so fragile that a joke in the margins breaks their focus, you have a hiring problem, not a documentation problem. Clarity and personality aren't mutually exclusive; a little humanity makes dense logic trees easier to parse and remember.
Q: How do I apply this to my boring B2B SaaS product without sounding unprofessional?
A: Stop writing Confluence pages like a robot. Write like you're explaining the system to a colleague at a bar. Use real scenarios, name the edge cases after team members, and don't be afraid to complain about the ugly parts of the architecture. The goal is connection, not stand-up comedy.
Q: Isn't it risky to treat internal process documents like an art project?
A: Professionalism is just a word used to justify mediocrity. The most iconic products in tech were built by obsessive weirdos who couldn't help but leave their fingerprints on everything they touched. Playing it safe is the fastest way to guarantee your product dies in the feed.