Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#151

Post by motohagiography » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 1:14 PM UTC

I use ontologies like https://webprotege.stanford.edu

Fewer descriptive words, more structure.

A company ontology has three top level categories: Parties(internal, external), Metrics(Platform, SaaS), and CompanyStructure which has links to things like cap table, incorporation artifacts, org chart, accounts, etc.

The metrics piece is useful because it provides north star metrics for a SaaS business, and then performance ones for the Platform itself. All features roll up into these, and then their git codebases are linked from there.

If your features don't drive your metrics, you're just in the custom dev business.

I use it personally, but it's a bit dominating to have an umbrella framework that encapsulates what people think is their special contribution.

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#152

Post by k__ » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 1:14 PM UTC

Mostly in my brain, some of it in a calendar and even less in my smartphones note app.

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#153

Post by gen220 » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 1:15 PM UTC

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #138

I work in a team closely related to another team, and together we're about 30 people in the midst of THOUSANDS of engineers responsible for shipping product. We are dying under the burden of tracking and correlating engineering decisions across product lines and customers through presentations (you can't have a meeting without PowerPoint!) and spreadsheets -- scattered all over internal shared drives -- email, and Sk…

We use confluence. To overcome the issues some other people have mentioned (namely, lack of version control), our confluence docs are generated from version controlled markdown docs. It’s integrated with our build system so it doesn’t require much thought, you get the benefits of having your documentation living with your code, and you generate a doc that’s easily searchable and shareable for non-engineers.

The only thing that sucks about this setup is that you can’t fix typos without making a diff :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#154

Post by swtrs » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 1:16 PM UTC

Personal : small library of notebooks, I generally dont share these

Professionally : physical notebooks and Onenote books. Every time I join a new team I start a new notebook and when I leave I pass it to someone else if they want it. My Onenote files are publicly accessible to anyone.

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#155

Post by bloopernova » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 1:18 PM UTC

mickael-kerjean wrote: post #28

bauerd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an org-mode editor besides Emacs that has a lower learning curve?

Yes, my favorite is the one I built myself which look like this: https://demo.filestash.app/view/emacs.org?share=hn It can create entire wikis by rendering documents in many formats: For example: - HTML: https://demo.filestash.app/api/export/hn/text/html/emacs.org - PDF: https://demo.filestash.app/api/export/hn/application/pdf/ema... - markdown: https://demo.filestash.app/api/export/hn/text/markdown/emacs... - txt: h…

oh, WOW this looks great. Serious, enthusiastic-yet-polite applause!

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#156

Post by nothrabannosir » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 1:18 PM UTC

Hippocrates wrote: post #145

I use the Notes app in iOS/OSX which has been getting insanely powerful in the last few years. Not only does it sync notes across devices, but indexes them for spotlight search anywhere. It also transcribes handwritten notes and makes them searchable, as well as scanned documents like receipts and business cards. Attaching photos, hand-drawn diagrams, tables, checklists and formatted text are simple. Notes can be hie…

I used Notes, until a botched sync flushed all my notes on my phone , propagated that to iCloud, then to my computer.

If you use notes, make sure that time machine actually backs them up. Otherwise you’re playing with fire.

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#157

Post by bloopernova » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

spencerwf wrote: post #10

I would suggest a single source of truth. In my marriage, it’s my wife’s google calendar. My personal projects are in a single google doc with tags I search for. I document my personal projects because sometimes I do stupid stuff and wipe out my work on accident. For work, We use confluence as the source. We have daily stand ups that go on there. For any screenshare 1v1s I create a quick doc to cover what we discusse…

Yes, very much this sort of thing. Every organization needs a single authoritative source of truth, whether that organization is a single person, a couple, a team, or a large corporation.

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#158

Post by tvanantwerp » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 1:24 PM UTC

zerm778 wrote: post #15

https://www.notion.so

I keep hearing how much people love Notion, but I really didn't enjoy it. I found the desktop app (Electron, no doubt) rather slow/unresponsive. And I hated the login system where they just email you a new temporary password each time you want access. I use a password manager, so this is absolutely awful for me. And I don't know how many times I wanted to reference a note on mobile without signal and was asked to log in again, which was of course impossible without my email! I just could not get into this product.

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#159

Post by crispyambulance » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 1:24 PM UTC

All the tool recommendations are nice. I am sure that folks have really awesome Confluence set-ups.

Whatever you do, however, there is NO replacement for face-to-face discussion and interaction. There's no replacement for pedagogy that is as old as history itself: the Socratic method. The best way to learn something is for both the teacher and the student to ask and answer questions, to solve problems together.

Yes, it's true that it only scales like 1 -> N, where N is a small number. BUT, each of those people in that initial small "N" can also rollout knowledge if they've mastered it, if they have the right attitude about sharing knowledge, and if you trust them to do that.

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#160

Post by Riverheart » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 1:29 PM UTC

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #138

I work in a team closely related to another team, and together we're about 30 people in the midst of THOUSANDS of engineers responsible for shipping product. We are dying under the burden of tracking and correlating engineering decisions across product lines and customers through presentations (you can't have a meeting without PowerPoint!) and spreadsheets -- scattered all over internal shared drives -- email, and Sk…

Wouldn't a self hosted Wiki or Gitlab instance using markdown files be better than a homegrown solution?