Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

141–150 of 304 posts

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

#141

I use Notion ( https://notion.so ) for pretty much everything (budgeting, tracking my PhD progress, high-level work-related projects, financial planning, etc). It's so flexible and has all the features you might reasonably want for managing information etc. It's essentially Evernote and Trello in one beautiful tool. At work we use Wikis for most things.

Can you make backups of your data that don't rely on notion to exist to be usable?

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

#142

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…

I'm in a similar company, but the main issue is that almost all modern solutions store the data in the "cloud", which isn't acceptable in that situation. Either my company has a contract for that tool (not our level of decision), or we have to store the data in-house.

Very few tools are made for self-hosting or using mapped shared drives nowadays.

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

#143
I rely heavily on https://workflowy.com/

Here is a quick interactive demo: https://workflowy.com/list-maker/

But I'm not sure how well that works with 50 people. You should probably mention what kind of knowledge you want to share and what features you might need.

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

#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 hierarchically organized into a folder structure (work, blog, 1:1s, ideas etc.) and locked for privacy (1:1s, performance reviews, holiday gifts etc.). They support sharing and basic collaborative editing too.

Notes seems so simple on the surface, but every time I use it I am delighted to find power-user features throughout.

My #1 feature request would be code blocks with syntax highlighting. It supports monospaced blockes for now. Perhaps even better would be if it would detect, accept and render markdown formatting.

Until then, a simple trick I use is: copy the RTF text from Notes into a GIST. It auto-converts to MD.

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

#146
* I use a Leuchtturm1917 A4 square-dotted hardcover notebook for immediate notes.

* Longer-term items go into Org-Mode in Spacemacs.

* On-the-go to-do items go into Org-Mode as well, via the excellent Android app "Orgzly". These are shared via Dropbox with the Spacemacs instance.

* Habits are also in Org-Mode, with the org-agenda habits view showing me how I'm doing on that. A habit being a repeated task, something you want to do semi-regularly like "remember to take preventative inhaler" or "do yoga at lunchtime when working from home". This is a good overview of org-agenda + habits view: https://blog.aaronbieber.com/2016/09/24/an-agenda-for-life-w...

* I used to also save technical discoveries as a long list on my personal DokuWiki page in our work instance. It would get written as "Short Headline", then description, then code examples. Things like Title: "YUM wildcards", Description: "Use “yum list”", Example: "[root@wiki01 ~]# yum list "php*fpm"". I intend to get back to that by using the note taking org-mode capability in Spacemacs and scripting a dump of those into a personal wiki "somewhere".

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

#147

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…

Yes! I tried multiple things in last 15 years, everything but OneNote failed me in one way or another.

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

#148
post #88

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 doin…

I didn't used to when i was first coding as a youngblood. But I'm now beginning to annotate code more for knowledge management. I'm finding that now that i'm getting back to coding on a (tiny, little more) frequent basis, my memory is suited to recent stuff...and to offload the "why" i coded something a certain way is helpful.

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

#149
post #124

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 fron…

The tragically correct answer. As I ready this I was hoping you were going to come up with a magic bullet at the end.

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

#150
post #9

Wikis built with org-mode is my magic bullet with everything under version control. The major problem was that everyone needed to know both git and Emacs to contribute but this is not the case since I made a proper web client https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

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

Yes, there's Spacemacs which is a Vim-a-like configuration for Emacs which works well as an org-mode editor too. It uses composable commands, like "space f s" for save all files. I've found it works very well across my work Mac, home PC, remote workspace, and Windows 10 WSL v1 and v2.

If you'd like to know more, either reply here or get in touch via my profile, I'd love to help you out (although it may be a bit delayed because I'm suffering from back issues right now). There's also reddit.com/r/emacs which helps a lot with org-mode stuff, much more than the org-mode subreddit. Plus you get to learn a bit of Lisp, which is pretty cool ;)

Post reply on HN