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?

#81

Post by vendiddy » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 9:33 AM UTC

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 because it's future-proof. Just a folder full of text files.

Curious how others are handling this same workflow.

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

#82

Post by daniel_iversen » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 9:35 AM UTC

I use our own product (Asana - http://asana.com) to coordinate all our work and it's also become a library and "brain" for everything that's happened. Personally I also use and love Dropbox Paper (http://paper.dropbox.com) for more long-form or ongoing research on topics both professionally and personally (I create a doc that I'll work on for a long time and can easily part it and come back to it, even share it with other people etc).

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

#83

Post by thundergolfer » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 9:40 AM UTC

tonyoaky wrote: post #76

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…

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.

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

#84

Post by mxschumacher » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 9:41 AM UTC

Spaced repetition [0] systems like Anki are usually used to study technical subjects or languages, but one of my "decks" is titled "my truths" and it contains insights I want to internalize. Repeated exposure is absolutely central actually making an idea part of yourself and acting accordingly. So instead of maintaining a large knowledge database, I'd recommend sticking to solid principles and reviewing them on a regular basis.

Once your team is getting slightly annoyed about how often you repeat something (solid code review principles or the importance of testing come to mind), you know you are saying it often enough.

I'm not a religious man, but an observation in an article called "We only learn if we repeat" in the "the book of life" [1] stuck with me: It's no coincidence that daily repetition of principles is a core tenant of the big religions. There's a fundamental insight about human nature in that and we can apply it to modern technology teams the same way it has been used in monasteries for centuries.

[0] http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

[1] https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/we-only-learn-...

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

#85

Post by Scarblac » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 9:43 AM UTC

mxschumacher wrote: post #84

Spaced repetition [0] systems like Anki are usually used to study technical subjects or languages, but one of my "decks" is titled "my truths" and it contains insights I want to internalize. Repeated exposure is absolutely central actually making an idea part of yourself and acting accordingly. So instead of maintaining a large knowledge database, I'd recommend sticking to solid principles and reviewing them on a reg…

I tried to start with Anki, but didn't really figure out how.

If you have a "truth" you want to remember, do you need to split it up into some sort of question / answer format to put on the front and back sides of a card?

I am already scoring well on the "annoying my team with repetitive statements in discussions" front.

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

#86

Post by ilovepeppapig » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 9:44 AM UTC

zerm778 wrote: post #15

https://www.notion.so

I honestly can't see any reason to use it over Confluence. Apart from better emoji support

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

#87

Post by fsiefken » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 9:44 AM UTC

A combination of indexed markdown documents, org-mode with orgzly (android) and devonthink (macos) as a gui Thinking of using TiddlyWiki as gui again as it works with Firefox Reality in the Oculus Go and Quest, but it doesn't work well with markdown and org-mode documents. Perhaps use it as yet another system.

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

#88

Post by Dowwie » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 9:46 AM UTC

Does anyone annotate code for knowledge management? I've reached a point where I've worked across so many projects and languages that when I return to code after some time, I can longer completely remember where I used certain patterns or other that I want to reuse elsewhere. Grep can only help so much with code alone. Documentation doesn't cover this category, either. So, I've started experimenting with ways of doing so.

I am experimenting with a custom markup that exists in code comments before, within, and following a code block that is the subject of discussion. I reuse markup attribute values to standardize categories.

Then, an app scans source for annotations and indexes them. I can then fuzzy search against the index using a range of words and get references.

If anyone likes this idea and would like to collaborate with it, and have the chops for doing so, contact me..

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

#89

Post by OJFord » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 9:49 AM UTC

Jedi72 wrote: post #74

OJFord wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO you should disclose (and it is a disclosure, not a disclaimer) your employer at the top, because it makes the rest of your comment something nearer to marketing copy than user review.

EDIT: Check OPs history, he asked this exact same question 46 days ago! Ive never heard of this startup before, now they're all over this thread. Do you reckon they made this whole thread for marketing purposes? OP is a pretty anonymous user. I already dislike them now & hopefully never have to use them. Someone else posted Tiddlywiki which is an amazing open-source program, suggest everyone at least check it out. It…

I don't think so, in that submission (which got much less attention) the only mention of Notion is OP doubting that it's more than hip design.

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

#90

Post by khakkarainen » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 9:49 AM UTC

sniuff wrote: post #35

missjellyfish wrote: post #31

At work I just made a huge organization overhaul. Previously, the entire state of a project was scattered throughout some markdown files in an absurdly complex git repository, a gitlab wiki and a stash of hand-written notes. It's now all nice and tidy in a Confluence space. Let's see how it goes and how this holds up when more people start working on this project again. I for myself are diciplined enough to care abou…

Have you thought about having markdowns rendered to a Confluence page? And maybe Confluence edits could get rendered back to git. For the first use case, there are libraries available that sync your .md to Confluence which you could add to your CI system.

With a bit of tweaking, Pandoc does a good job of rendering HTML that Confluence likes. I wrote some scripts a couple of years ago to do this, using the Confluence API to add and update pages. It’s also possible to do a round-trip because someone will invariably edit the Confluence page.