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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?

#121

Post by zomgwat »

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.

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

#123

Post by mattlutze »

The best way to share knowledge at work and in life is regular conversation with the people on the team. No matter the method for capturing knowledge, a lot of folks on the team aren't going to find things in it. Many experienced people on the team having wide-reaching networks throughout the team will be better surfacing of various things they've all learned, as well as improve overall design and architecture of what you're working on, and improve the education and quality of work for the rest of the team. This can be further augmented with formal design and implementation meetings, where problems and choices are discussed with revolving groups of people.

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

#124

Post by usrusr »

First I distinguish between two kinds of knowledge: one is like encyclopedic knowledge, just with private topics (what is X, why did Y come into existence, things you must know when Z), the other overlaps a lot with opinion, "best practice" and "style guide" would be examples.

Both may end up in the internal wiki, but that's a write-only operation unless you get people to read. And a wiki is nothing anyone reads front to back, wikis are entirely pull.

For the encyclopedic kind, I try to sprinkle some links where there is a chance that people (e.g. me, two months later) actually do an index search. This is not the wiki, this is email (or some successor thereof).

The opinion type knowledge will be even more lost in the wiki. Outside of extremely chain-of-command oriented organizations, the only way to spread that kind of knowledge is by actually convincing others. And a wall of text in an internal wiki will never do that. But the wiki page can be very useful as a collection of convincing examples etc to reference in a discussion that happens elsewhere.

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

#127

Post by masnick »

I have a personal "knowledge base" that is publicly available at https://maxmasnick.com/kb/.

This is partially inspired by Chris Albon's excellent data science technical notes: http://chrisalbon.com.

I find it very helpful to have this kind of information on a public website. It's easy to search myself, quick to edit[^1], and helpful for sharing with others when someone asks me a question.

For notes I don't want to make public, I use OneNote. It's available on every platform, has a documented file format, and the sync works well. Of course, I have some more detailed notes on why I prefer this to other options: https://maxmasnick.com/kb/note-apps/.

[^1]: My whole website is built with https://gohugo.io. I use the GitHub Actions beta to automatically update the public site every time I commit to master. This means I can edit on a computer with a standard text editor, and also on iOS using https://workingcopyapp.com.

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

#129

Post by sjogress »

mattlutze wrote: post #123

The best way to share knowledge at work and in life is regular conversation with the people on the team. No matter the method for capturing knowledge, a lot of folks on the team aren't going to find things in it. Many experienced people on the team having wide-reaching networks throughout the team will be better surfacing of various things they've all learned, as well as improve overall design and architecture of wha…

I think you are right in most cases, but I find wikis to be excellent for how-to/recipe kind of information.

These can be either technical (e.g how to bootstrap a new repository or how to connect to this database), organisatorial (e.g how to apply for vacation or how to apply for conference funds) or simply office related (e.g how to print something, how to refill coffee-beans on the coffee-machine).

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