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Comment by anitil | Hacker News Reader

This would have been very useful at my previous job. We had a gdrive folder with '2024' or '2025' with a bunch of google docs with no inter-linking between them. If you were lucky the title would be vaguely related to the topic you are working on, and maaaaaybe there'd be a link to prior work. Frequently I'd look at an RFC, see no approvals but then find out it _had_ been approved but nobody actually updated the document. Infurating.

I'm not sure the reason for friction. These are developers, they know how to use git etc, but management prefers google docs I suppose (previous iterations were confluence, then markdown on github).

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I'm glad to hear you would have found it beneficial!

I've definitely seen the same patterns at companies (and even introduced similar patterns).

The proposal linking was inspired both by IETF RFCs and by Jira issues. I love how both systems provide semantic meanings to such links (X obsoletes Y).

I do hope to marry the engineering love of markdown with management's love of WYSIWYG. Currently the proposal editing process is done via a syntax-highlighted markdown editor but in the future I'll add a WYSIWYG editor, then let users select a default mode.

To be honest (and I'm just some rando so feel free to ignore me), if you have an MVP I'd say forget about development and sell what you have. You're already better than what I've seen in industry. If anything, being able to take an existing decision database and onboard it to RFC Hub (even if done manually) would be a better sell than WYSIWYG to enterprise customers.

Great ideas!

You convinced me tonight to implement a feature: pasting content from Google Docs now gets converted into markdown. For example bold becomes *bold*, heading 1 becomes # Heading. It'll even find monospace fonts in a paragraph and add `code` ticks or monospace on dedicated lines and convert into ```code blocks```.

Faster automation would of course be nicer, e.g. providing a Google Drive directory and slurping all of the docs up, but that'll take a bit more time.

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