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Ask HN: How do you handle release notes for multiple audiences?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you handle release notes for multiple audiences?

#51
I author internal software rather than something public, but I think this method still would apply thinking back on SaaS apps I've built.

I use Github generated release notes based on Pull Request bodies and this is more than sufficient for my dev team.

I think have a small app in my different internal web application called `releases` (a Django app) that has a simple model called Release. I hand write the release notes, copy and paste the version number, and select date for each release (sometimes I'll batch add them if I get behind).

But I had write them with my audience in mind (business system users - who care about specific bugs or features; i leave out any internal things that wouldn't be of interest).

At the footer, or a small indicator in side bar, I display the version number that was created through our automated release process (Github Release triggers a release and the tag that is the version number gets set as an env var in my Docker image). Clicking that takes the user to a /release-notes/ page that has a descending order list of the notes that I hand author in the Django admin.

Pretty low tech but I find I like to be able to hand author the notes with the user's in mind.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle release notes for multiple audiences?

#52
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your idea of an additional human summary, that does definitely help. > That’s funny, because I find the lack of automation to be the lazy choice. Automation is cheap these days. Many automations make things that exceed human ability, but this isn't one of those cases. You'll get something good-enough, but not great. Perhaps that's what your organisation has time and budget for, in which case your use of automa…

> Automation is cheap these days. […] valid changelog checked by a release manager If affirmation is cheap, why hire humans to sit and manually validate if a text file was updated? Maybe you have a lot of cheap labor or a lack of automation experts. > The changelog you have is so large and poorly-structured that you need to use an AI to summarise it for you https://terranix.org/news-2025-11-09_website_renewal.html No…

> Since 2025-04-25, terranix has had two maintainers

I see our difference in perspective. My organisation has over 100k people.

A release manager's job is not just to sit around reading text files. They can fly to customer sites to help with new releases, etc. For some clients, our software _cannot_ break.

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