Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 304 posts

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

#271

Post by Havoc »

masnick wrote: post #248
Havoc wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity how much traffic does the personal kb get?

Essentially zero. It's not well-advertised, and I only started it in earnest earlier this year. My Technical Notes blog ( https://tech-notes.maxmasnick.com ), which is a similar idea but much more random in content, does get a fair bit of traffic on specific pages, presumably via organic search traffic. (This is the most popular Tech Notes page, which has had 30k views over the last 4 years: https://tech-notes.maxmas…

Thanks for answering. Been toying with doing something similar - documenting stuff as I figure it out (webhosting, raspberry pis etc) & see if that attracts any traffic.

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

#273

Post by bryanmgreen »

Self-promo: I'm currently building software called Thanks For Sharing.

At launch, we'll be focusing on features that help employees to provide feedback to their organization leaders.

We're also exploring requirements for building out internal knowledge bases for organizations that have more sharing and communicative elements. Link in my bio if any are interested.

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

#274

Post by miomyosky11 »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #142
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #138

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.

Shameless plug here. Exactly why FileCloud does the job in this condition. You expose your shared network drive over the network and then via FileCloud it is just seamless access to those documents etc. no more slow vpn.

We run a server internally and all our documents are stored there.

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

#275

Post by kuzimoto »

masnick wrote: post #250
arunc wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No mention of KeePass under password managers?!

I'm only interested in password managers with good desktop, web, and mobile support.

Just curious, what do you find lacking about Keepass in those areas?

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

#276

Post by kevinslin »

masnick wrote: post #127

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…

really like your knowledge base and your build process.

i've been experimenting with personal knowledge bases for much of the last decade and have settled on a homegrown solution that involves ten thousand markdown files. notes are organized as trees with a top level domain (eg. aws, programming, finance, etc) and finding a particular note is a tree traversal down the tree. the main goal is speed and structure - want to access anything within my knowledge base in seconds and have a coherent way of modeling knowledge even as it scales past ten thousand notes

recently quit my job to build this into a service. would love to get feedback from people with similar challenges: http://demo.alphacortex.io

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

#277

Post by mch82 »

mch82 wrote: post #44

Mediawiki works quite well. Most people use Wikipedia, so are able to quickly learn & use Mediawiki. Wikimedia Foundation has a number of initiatives to increase the diversity of Wikipedia contributors, so that translates into features non-technical people in your org will appreciate. Microsoft was using Mediawiki for external-facing developer docs (at least on the HoloLens site), but after the GitHub acquisition has…

For personal notes, I’ve fallen back to plain text files with Markdown formatting. They’re relatively easy to search & avoid vendor lock-in so I can retain access to my writing. I try to include a common word in the title of related text files to aid finding them. But usually I can just type a phrase into Mac or Windows operating system search and find the note I’m looking for. I’m still deciding if it’s worth organizing my notes into folders.

Previously, I wrote papers and notes in a variety of word processors and page layout tools (Claris Works, Word, Apple Works, Pages, InDesign). Over time I’d miss an upgrade cycle, switch OS, or couldn’t justify the cost of an upgrade and lost access to many of those files. So far text files have proven to be quite portable across editor apps & I’ve also found writing in plain text helps me focus my thinking.

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

#278

Post by grwthckrmstr »

Nelson Joyce is building Tettra to solve the very problem you're describing

Nelson on Twitter - https://twitter.com/nelsonjoyce

Tettra - https://tettra.co

Edit: I'm not affiliated to him or Tettra in any way. I just follow his Twitter for his transparency and useful insights in building a company. Hence I would happily recommend his product to anyone facing the exact problem

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

#279

Post by Yoofie »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #255
rubicon33 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what tags are for? Search by tag?

I don't know. Can you point at an implementation you like?

[pinboard.in][1] has an implementation that I like. What I especially like about pinboard is that you can chain tags together (logically AND'd, not OR'd) to narrow/filter topics to highly specific criteria. This all works well provided you usefully tag your entries.

[1]:https://pinboard.in

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

#280

Post by namuol »

Video chat sessions that are recorded and shared with everyone. This includes things like pair programming, but also just normal conversations on topics that are too green for any kind of formal documentation.

Then as you build consensus it makes sense to start putting things in writing to reference in future discussions.

When putting things in writing, put as much of this in your code as possible, and don't be afraid to repeat yourself in many places.

Be deliberate about how you name things. You should choose names that align with names used across disciplines/teams in verbal communication.

Cross reference things by these identifiers, even if you're not using any formal documentation generator.

Rely on new employees to write high level documentation, with seniors around to answer their questions. A new hire will have the ideal perspective, and will become an expert in the process. Pay them accordingly ;)

Don't worry about docs getting out of date. Again, rely on new hires to find issues with docs.

Be relentless about reducing "API surface area" of your subsystems.

Post reply on HN