We often think of documentation as an obligation, or as a technical artifact — notes for the next person, crumbs for debugging. But I’ve come to believe that process documentation can be something else entirely. It can be reflective. Even beautiful. Especially when it’s made tangible.

There’s a kind of dignity in turning digital exhaust into a permanent record. Not for legal reasons, not for due diligence, but because it mattered. Because it was lived. Because it was real.

In a time when everything’s ephemeral — servers, feeds, content, even friendships — making something physical is an act of resistance. It says: this happened. We were here. These were our words, our wins, our rides, our weird snacks, our late-night grinds getting buggy software bug-free.

These people meant something to me. We were a thing, a moment, a crew.

And now that chapter has a spine, a cover, and a place on the shelf.

Maybe one day I’ll forget the name of a channel, or a person, or a whacky weird moment, or a hotel room, or the only retaurant open in Helsinki airport when the LAX non-stop arrives after 12 hours of travel after midnight (the Burger King at the bottom of the escalator on the other side of security.) But I’ll still have the book. I’ll still be able to open to a random page and remember who I was when I was in the middle of building something that didn’t exist yet.

There’s real value in that. Not just nostalgic value — but felt value. Emotional, sensory, memory-irrational value. The kind that doesn’t show up in OKRs or investor updates.

And honestly? I think we need more of that kind of value.

I started cobbling these books together as a kind of scrapbook. It starts with the images that tell more stories than words really can. I would take screenshots at moments particularly when i could see the moment from the future. I organized photos crudely by “departments” — marketing, branding, product development, engineering, app, logistics. I imagined that there would be chapters on these topics — a rough way to organize the story.

Over time I’d go to these growing documents and annotate, doodle, illustrate. I won’t say these are brilliantly done, but these are a thing I wanted to have on the shelf. The small meaningful stories often fade, and its invigorating to see a photo and be reminded of the moment, the person, the place, the feeling.