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

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

#281

Post by SenHeng »

teamonkey wrote: post #266
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am impressed. Whenever I try to build a tree of thoughts, I run into the problem that I want things to fall under multiple categories. I might start by classifying them according to subject area (as you have done), but then I might want a collection of those notes to also fall under "could help with project X" or "would be of interest to person Y" or "can be learned from reference Z" or any number of things.

This is a use of AI I've not seen yet, to sift through soups of knowledge, categorise it and make judgements on what else is related and relevant

Isn't this essentially what search engines do? Ie. Google's Page Rank.

It doesn't really seem very AI-ish except maybe for some NLP. Otherwise it's very straightforward indexes and catelogues.

I used to work at a company that used Elasticsearch to catelog and group articles and small snippets. I'm currently working at a company that's using Algolia to do something similar.

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

#282

Post by geocar »

koonsolo wrote: post #258
geocar wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A programmer who writes their own documentation is like a barber cutting their own hair: Economical perhaps, but worse for anyone who has to look at the result. And yes, if your audience is programmers, then ideally you can hire technical writers who can program, and who can speak to programmers, but failing that, technical writers who can get proofread by a programmer can also work. Having a single consistent voice…

A programmer writing documentation is far from economical, since most of the time their time is worth more than technical writers. It depends on the type of documentation of course, but if you work in a 50 person team and you want to document internal architecture or code structure, you better let the programmer that knows about the stuff write it. First getting that technical writer up to speed about how everything…

> A programmer writing documentation is far from economical...

And then you go on to explain a way that it is more economical; Time is also an important economic consideration.

> First getting that technical writer up to speed about how everything is structured, the little implications etc, is pretty insane. It's like that phone game where you tell one person something, and then that one tells the next.

No. That's what happens when you have a non-technical writer do technical writing. I wouldn't have felt like I have to say this but just because someone has "technical writer" in their job title doesn't mean they can do that job.

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

#283

Post by alexchamberlain »

wakatime wrote: post #21
alexchamberlain wrote: post #4

Sharing knowledge is tough; I don't think there's a silver bullet and everyone wishes they could do it better. Some strategies we use: - Mailing Lists - a collection of mailing lists people can subscribe to if they're interested in a topic. Bonus points if you dedupe messages, as it's kind of annoying to get the same message more than once. We BCC to avoid Reply-to-All discussions/arguments. - Discussion board - disc…

Mailing lists is a trap. As your company grows it implements a data retention policy and poof, there goes all your knowledge when your old emails are auto-deleted. Only use mailing lists for notification with links to the actual knowledge in a real document.

I think it's best to 1) store the original messages outside your email system and 2) keep discussions to discourse or similar. That way, you have tools designed for the job and independent storage of discussions.

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

#284

Post by koonsolo »

geocar wrote: post #282
koonsolo wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A programmer writing documentation is far from economical, since most of the time their time is worth more than technical writers. It depends on the type of documentation of course, but if you work in a 50 person team and you want to document internal architecture or code structure, you better let the programmer that knows about the stuff write it. First getting that technical writer up to speed about how everything…

> A programmer writing documentation is far from economical... And then you go on to explain a way that it is more economical; Time is also an important economic consideration. > First getting that technical writer up to speed about how everything is structured, the little implications etc, is pretty insane. It's like that phone game where you tell one person something, and then that one tells the next. No. That's wh…

Yes, but they didn't do that job.

If my colleague programmer works a week on refactoring some code, I honestly have no clue what was changed. There is only 1 person who actually knows what and why.

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

#285

Post by geocar »

koonsolo wrote: post #284
geocar wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A programmer writing documentation is far from economical... And then you go on to explain a way that it is more economical; Time is also an important economic consideration. > First getting that technical writer up to speed about how everything is structured, the little implications etc, is pretty insane. It's like that phone game where you tell one person something, and then that one tells the next. No. That's wh…

Yes, but they didn't do that job. If my colleague programmer works a week on refactoring some code, I honestly have no clue what was changed. There is only 1 person who actually knows what and why.

I don't believe you can have 50 people producing knowledge and checking in code that nobody ever looks at or reviews, writing documentation that all 50 are expected to know, and have even a good portion of that 50 people understand it well.

I also think that if you have developers working for a week without anyone who knows what they're doing you have a management problem.

We might be talking past each other, and I might not understand exactly what you're saying.

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

#286

Post by glaberficken »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #118
glaberficken wrote: post #93

I only run documentation for a small team (4 people), so can´t comment on scaling. But after a lot of failed attempts (word document, text files, wiki) for now we settled on MS OneNote... yeah I know... as team leader I was resistant to it. But after noticing my team members had each started their individual notebooks, I thought - what's the point on trying to force them to use something I think is better but that is…

Isn't Onenote only available on Onedrive (Microsoft's cloud) after Office 2016? So you won't be able to keep it on your Sharepoint in the future.

In my case we have Office 365 subscriptions so everything is guaranteed to keep working in the future. I said it is stored on sharepoint because technically it is where it is stored. In terms of user experience it is surfaced via MS Teams (i.e. I upload it via MS teams, and I go to MS teams to get the link. but the file itself lives on the office 365 provided sharepoint server... this part of the MS ecosystem is shambles...)

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

#287

Post by glaberficken »

zomgwat wrote: post #121
glaberficken wrote: post #93

I only run documentation for a small team (4 people), so can´t comment on scaling. But after a lot of failed attempts (word document, text files, wiki) for now we settled on MS OneNote... yeah I know... as team leader I was resistant to it. But after noticing my team members had each started their individual notebooks, I thought - what's the point on trying to force them to use something I think is better but that is…

My experience is similar to yours. We also have a monolithic MS OneNote notebook. The notebook is shared by 30+ people and we haven't experienced scaling issues at that level either. To add to your list of features, the macOS and iOS apps work well which is nice since we have a mix of Windows and macOS users.

> "To add to your list of features, the macOS and iOS apps work well which is nice since we have a mix of Windows and macOS users."

True!

And it also has a very good web version so you can easily browse the documentation even if you are not on your main work computer (from home, from a coleague's desktop or laptop). This is a feature I really on all the time actually.

IMHO MS has really step up their game in terms of the web versions of their apps. A couple of years ago we were still being force fed this clunky outlook web version that only worked properly in IE, and now we have popper functional cross browser web apps for everything.

Screenshot of One Note web interface: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/wp-conten...

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

#288

Post by tmaly »

thundergolfer wrote: post #83
tonyoaky wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use any specific structure for your markdown documents? Confluence i believe helps structure the knowledge

But Confluence crucially isn’t source-controlled within the same repo. It’s not source controlled at all. I find this a terrible workflow problem. As often a change to code requires a small or large change to documentation that is best bundled in alongside.

It does have change history of each page. However, if you use a lot of embedded tables, it is quite hard to do change comparisons.

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

#289

Post by [deleted] »

vendiddy wrote: post #81
tomashubelbauer wrote: post #49

I use Markdown documents in Git repositories whenever I can. Also try to evangelize for this at work. PRs then include relevant changes to both code and docs and it's beautiful. For personal project docs I use this exclusively. At work it depends on the team, some people don't like it, but most often it is because they don't like keeping docs at all, not because of an alternative preference. I avoid UI and WYSIWYG ba…

I do this too. I use Sublime text in distraction free mode with a git plugin so I can easily commit/push changes. On my Mac, I can do the 4-finger swipe to check my full-screen notes. Usually I have a folder structure like notes/2019-10/2019-10-21.txt. If I want to tag things, I'll just write #idea #work somewhere in the text file. Then easy to search with Sublime or whatever tool you want. I also like this approach…

[deleted]

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

#290

Post by synlatexc »

vendiddy wrote: post #81
tomashubelbauer wrote: post #49

I use Markdown documents in Git repositories whenever I can. Also try to evangelize for this at work. PRs then include relevant changes to both code and docs and it's beautiful. For personal project docs I use this exclusively. At work it depends on the team, some people don't like it, but most often it is because they don't like keeping docs at all, not because of an alternative preference. I avoid UI and WYSIWYG ba…

I do this too. I use Sublime text in distraction free mode with a git plugin so I can easily commit/push changes. On my Mac, I can do the 4-finger swipe to check my full-screen notes. Usually I have a folder structure like notes/2019-10/2019-10-21.txt. If I want to tag things, I'll just write #idea #work somewhere in the text file. Then easy to search with Sublime or whatever tool you want. I also like this approach…

Same here, though mine is one gigantic text file that dates back ~20 years.

Expect to continue updating/referencing it for decades to come, bar some calamity.

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