How to Document a Side Project (Without Spending a Weekend on It)

Why side projects rarely have good docs

You built the thing. You understand it completely. The idea of explaining it feels redundant — surely anyone looking at the code can figure it out.

This logic works fine when the only user is you. The moment someone else needs to use, evaluate, or contribute to your project, undocumented code becomes a significant barrier. A recruiter who sees your GitHub without documentation will spend 30 seconds on it before moving on. A potential user who cannot figure out how to install your project in five minutes will close the tab.

Documentation is not about the code. It is about the reader.

What your side project actually needs documented

You do not need to document everything. Most side projects need five things, in this order:

The format that works

For a small side project, a well-structured README is often enough. For anything with more than one user or more than a handful of features, a proper documentation site makes a significant difference.

A documentation site — even a simple one — communicates seriousness. It says this project is maintained. It says someone cares about the experience of using it. It is also searchable, which a README is not.

The barrier to having a proper documentation site used to be significant: you needed to set up a static site generator, write custom themes, maintain the deployment pipeline. Tools like AlgoQuill remove this entirely — you connect your repository and have a live documentation site in minutes, without writing the documentation manually.

Step by step: documenting a side project with AlgoQuill

The documentation that impresses people most

After building and reviewing a lot of side project documentation, the projects that leave the strongest impression share one quality: they explain the decisions.

Not just what the project does, but why it was built that way. Why did you choose this database? Why is authentication handled this way rather than the more common approach? What tradeoffs did you make?

This kind of documentation shows engineering thinking, not just engineering output. It is the difference between a project that looks like a tutorial exercise and one that looks like something a thoughtful developer built intentionally.

AI documentation generators can produce the structure and the factual content. The decisions and the reasoning are yours to add — and they are what make the documentation genuinely useful rather than just accurate.