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Comment by crossroadsguy | Hacker News Reader

After suffering Jira at two previous employers when it was being considered at the third org, I lobbied, pretty much begged, and cried along with many other colleagues who had this inflicted upon them previously. Yes, we indeed ended up with Jira and one another Atlassian monstrosity.

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Confluence? I know most people really want a hard-to-use wiki with a special markdown flavor to write up things that instantly go stale, never to be reviewed again. Or, at least that's the only way I've really seen Confluence used?

Nah. The prime use case of Confluence is to tick "yes I've written the documentation".

You can fail to maintain a wiki written in any software. The value of Confluence is when everyone uses it, so there’s one place to find info to answer questions like “why the hell did we do it this way?”

The tricky part of that is the 'find' phase, as Confluence has a comically bad search.

Yes, but it's easier to fail when the markdown (or NIH markdown in the case of Confluence) is far removed from the code it describes. Which is why you should document closer to the products. Markdown files living by your code and even generated from code is way better than any experience I've had with Confluence (which is closing up on two decades soon enough).

I used Confluence a mere decade ago and, if anything, the 10 years after you used it only magnified its flaws relatively to what else was by then available so you didn’t miss much, and I suspect we haven’t missed much since, except more bloat.

I love confluence because it has the worst search engine I've ever used. I used to think TikTok search was the worst: no matter what you typed, you would get only videos of people dancing. World's largest rock? Here's 12 videos of people dancing the renegade. 2020 election? Here's a video of someone dressed like Donald Trump dancing the renegade. Gatorade? Surely you meant the renegade, right? Here's some videos of people dancing the renegade.

But TikTok actually fixed that, so now Confluence is back on top. Good on you, Atlassian.

If any half-competent developer tried to write his first search engine it would be better than that of Confluence. It's unbelievable.

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