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Ask HN: What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

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Re: Ask HN: What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

#11

Post by user6723 »

Our sys admin put in the crontab on our systems a script that fetches and runs Ansible code if the code has an accompanying valid crypto signature.

Mostly it deploys Podman configs to run proxies that do "nat traversal" and provide various things on our machine most using Git as a backend.

Our internal docs are mostly a variant of Markdown or Scientific Markdown.

We use a private Jitsi server for meetings and our company policy is to never impose influence (no matter how light) on any employee to inadvertantly leak their likeness/biometrics to a third party org.

Our CIO is pretty legit I must say.

Re: Ask HN: What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

#12

Post by user6723 »

user6723 wrote: post #11

Our sys admin put in the crontab on our systems a script that fetches and runs Ansible code if the code has an accompanying valid crypto signature. Mostly it deploys Podman configs to run proxies that do "nat traversal" and provide various things on our machine most using Git as a backend. Our internal docs are mostly a variant of Markdown or Scientific Markdown. We use a private Jitsi server for meetings and our com…

I see other comments mentioning IM. We have Matrix' Synapse on a private bare-metal K8s and outside clients can access our private Element Web from another K8s cluster when we need to collaborate more directly. Some clients or partner orgs have their own Matrix servers.

Re: Ask HN: What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

#14

Post by kernelsoe »

faraggi wrote: post #6

To simplify, we _tried_ to centralize everything into a single service- and failed. I thought we could use googles services to do everything. meet, docs, drive, cal but we obviously has to add GitHub, and then Jira (ugh), discord, etc...

I think this is one of the core pain points. Google workspace is like being default for most startups tied to email but then GW don't have enough tools or high quality enough? I would rather use notion than writing in google doc for e.g.

Re: Ask HN: What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

#17

Post by kernelsoe »

mannyv wrote: post #5

The current startup is using notion and GitHub. Github is a POS when it comes to bug tracking. Notion is pretty good. It's somehow different and more annoying than Confluence, but faster. Jira/Confluence IMO is pretty good, but people have a love/hate relationship with it. If you actually use them they're great. Notion becomes a disorganized pile of crap, just like Confluence. Confluence allows you to link stuff to J…

Linking issues and doc is pretty much nice feature. I don't have Atlassian experience but I feel Notion databases slow to interact and with unnecessary animations and transitions. Sure regular Notion pages are fast to load. Coming from extensive excel user teams, Sheets is really hard for me to navigate.

Re: Ask HN: What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

#18

Post by nivertech »

akg_67 wrote: post #7
kernelsoe wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had heavily used excel in my previous job from project management to heavy calculations. One of the most versatile tools! I love spreadsheets.

I am on the other end of the scale. I don't like excel and spreadsheets for anything non-data related information. I usually decline clients if they follow "spreadsheet driven software development" process specially if combined with frequent long meetings.

I experienced this in Scrum planning, daily standups, and other rituals were done with Excel shared via Zoom (or similar) meetings.

The Scrum Master would ask each team member a question (e.g. estimation, etc.) and then fill the Excel while online, wasting everyone's time.

Same with planning, there will be some basic template for a sprint, and it will be filled with the estimations/Jira tickets during the online meeting!

Given said that, there are some valid uses for shared spreadsheets in Product/SDLC.

One method I used is specific for data engineering projects: the product fills Excel/Google Spreadsheet with the example input, output shapes in the form of tables, and the developers asking question while they arriving to common spec.

Another is called Decision Matrix (almost as old as Periodic Table;), which was recently popularized by Rich Hickey in his talk Design in Practice[1,2].

Another valid usecase for shared spreadsheets is Use Cases table.

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[1] https://youtu.be/c5QF2HjHLSE?t=2351

[2] slide #31 https://download.clojure.org/presentations/DesignInPractice....

Re: Ask HN: What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

#19

Post by matt34 »

We use Notion for all Q&A's, Docs, How To's, Product Specs... . For short living information we just drop everything into Slack. As soon as we notice sth. originally intended to be short-lived takes on long term value, we go back to creating docs in Notion.

Re: Ask HN: What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

#20

Post by CedricTeyton »

kernelsoe wrote: post #15
CedricTeyton wrote: post #9

At Promyze, we use Slack for IM and Notion for non-tech documentation. For tech knowledge, we dogfood our own tool.

Interesting! what kind of tools are you guys built and using for tech knowledge base?

Thanks!

We're building a collaborative platform to gather and share best coding practices.

In short, it helps us highlight code snippets from the IDE (JetBrains, Visual Studio, VS Code), discuss them in Slack (or MS Teams or Discord or Mattermost), and document them with contextual examples.

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