Hacker News Reader

Comment by ketzo | Hacker News Reader

I like the look of this a lot, particularly the support for running-from-local. I think git is such an ideal backend for something like a wiki, where multiple contributors and version history are both so important.

Tangent: how do HN folks generally do technical wikis -- or really, just keep track of the technical details of your software -- in large software development organizations?

My org uses Confluence for some stuff, Github pages and READMEs for others. It's... fine. It's not the worst I've ever seen, you can find some useful stuff with a little bit of work and some knowledge about where to look, but it's still very likely that whatever you're reading is either outdated or now-irrelevant.

How do you (and your team) solve the challenge of keeping documentation actually relevant and up-to-date when there are so many people writing so much code, then leaving two years later?

View on HN

I always find Confluence to be the place where docs go to die. There's very little motivation to keep it up to date and tends to be one or two people driving it. When they move to another team or job, then it gets abandoned.

The things my team uses GitHub pages for tends to do better because devs don't object too heavily to writing code comments (for generated docs), markdown (for design docs), or API specs (for API docs). The last two in particular have become a big part of the design process, so it's been bought into heavily. Whether those stand the test of time remains to be seen - they're relatively new.

My problem with docs in repos is it isn't as smooth to edit, especially if you have to wait for reviews.

You can always just make the semantics of the doc folder or repo push permissions match what you're looking for, ie. 'no real reviews necessary to push to master' if that's the semantics you're looking for.

I agree that this is actually a much bigger deal than it would initially seem.

Any kind of friction is a huge problem when it comes to a task that people are already sort of reluctant to do; just the thought of "ah, fuck, I gotta get two reviews just to add a couple lines of setup instructions?" makes people way less likely to update repo docs as frequently as they need to.

> I always find Confluence to be the place where docs go to die

Yeah... I'm not a big fan either. Currently in my team we just use google docs for more dynamic stuff, and have a wiki page with links to all docs. Otherwise we know that people won't bother editing

I remember seeing somewhere GDoc to Markdown converter.

After the initial discussion is finished, the Google doc can be converted to the [Github-flavored] Markdown and stored in the [Github] repo.

It would be a good idea to create an initial GDoc based on the markdown template from the repo.

Frankly with the speed of Github innovation, they will be adding GDoc-like commenting and collaboration soon.

Not sure how it can be integrated with git branches though.

To me Confluence's problem is the not-very-relevant search, which either gives me generic blank documents that someone created as a placeholder (?!? -- I've started suffixing these with (blank)) or fails to find synonyms or related words when I can't quite come up with the exact search term (wonder if these "related words or synonyms" could be manually added...)

I'm sure it is a difficult problem but I haven't really found any good solutions other than "make really long titles that use many words to describe the content" or "Add lots of tags" and even them I'm not sure it helps or not. Does the search take into account click-through rate? Link count?

> gives me generic blank documents that someone created as a placeholder ... fails to find synonyms or related words ... Add lots of tags

These kinds of problems can be solved using neural networks as the foundation for search (variously termed "neural information retrieval" and "semantic search"). I worked on this at Google Research from 2016-2020, before launching ZIR AI in 2020 to make neural search available as a PaaS, just like Elasticsearch and Algolia have done for keyword matching.

Here are a couple of introductory pieces if you're interested in learning more:

[1] https://blog.zir-ai.com/the-high-cost-of-keyword-search, "The High Cost of Keyword Search"

[2] https://blog.zir-ai.com/semantic-search-helps-chatbots-answe... "Semantic search helps chatbots answer more questions"

I concur about confluence being where things die. There's a dev on our team that is very big on confluence whereas I'm not. Ironically, I am big on documenting our public methods from the perspective of a user of our library whereas he puts javadocs on private methods. He has more experience than I do, so I don't fight him on it, but man do I find it futile.

There is only one way to make documention works. This is to have everyone following the same standards. This is not enough of course.

You can have different people using different tools to write it, but all those documents needs to be referenced at the same place and be searchable at least by title. There is no magic tool this is first a people/process problem

If your org has several place to find it and no strategy. Then the first step is to have a documentation strategy. That will not solve all your issues, but without it you are going to be very limited

We use self-hosted Readthedocs [0] with git/repo integration - merge to master triggers a build.

[0] https://readthedocs.org/

Gitea supports web-based wikis that are git repos on the backend.

It also has a good auth system and supports U2F (or SSO).

Unless that has changed recently, gitea doesn’t provide any way to search a wiki (!), making it quite useless for documentation.

I use GitHub wiki’s but they’re not perfect and I think about this a lot.

I’ve been thinking about building something like Slack but for documentation instead of conversation. A git repo is a great way to store your files so that you have history, backups, and avoid vendor lock-in.

I like to write docs with Jekyll in the same repository of the code, not in separate repository as in GitHub. In this way I can document the changes in a feature branch and leave unchanged the docs in the release branch. Then the changes get merged when we release the feature.

A customer of mine writes documentation in Google Sites (horrible UX and not for for this task, they eventually realized it) and my pages (Bitbucket) are linked from the table of contents (release branch). To read the documentation for a new feature one must know the name of the feature branch.

Notion.

I would love to have something like Notion but using git for all data storage and edit history.

There is https://stackedit.io/ offering it but I stopped using it because of bugs when trying to edit on mobile. And it basically abandoned for the last 2 years https://github.com/benweet/stackedit (only some deps updates, nothing more).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com