The author outlines the role of Request for Comments (RFC) documents in software engineering, distinguishing them from technical specifications and design documents. While a specification defines project requirements, an RFC serves as a collaborative proposal for architectural solutions, and a design document provides implementation instructions.
The lack of formal RFC processes often leads to inefficient development cycles, including wasted time on discarded technical approaches. The author shares a personal case study involving the development of a custom image codec for a manga reader, where the absence of an RFC resulted in approximately 50 hours of lost productivity due to trial-and-error coding.
Effective RFC writing should move beyond the 'what' of a project to include 'why', 'how', and 'when'. These questions help justify technology choices, address potential bugs, define scaling strategies—such as handling 100,000 requests per second—and establish conditions for future system refactoring or infrastructure migrations.
The author notes a trend in the CIS region where technical specifications, RFCs, and design documents are often conflated into a single document. This practice complicates project planning and architectural decision-making, as it blurs the line between business requirements and engineering implementation strategies.
