stack overflow for internal documentation
For a long time in software eng, we talked about how nice an internal stack overflow would be.
It would:
- Lower the barrier to documentation capture
- Provide an outlet for problems/solutions we encountered in the code base
- Start to cover a history that new hires could follow and use to get up to speed
Well, one day we looked into it, and sure enough Stack Overflow offers exactly this thing, and though it was hidden behind a 'submit-email'-wall, then you can just start adding users and paying ~$6 dollars per user per month. We immediately signed up, and it bloomed with content. Hook that up to a Slack integration, and suddenly the teams are communicating in an asynchronous web, building onboarding docs as needed, and answering cross-team questions for all to see, edit, and comment on (or submit your own answer).
It wasn't perfect across every team, of course, but for the engineers that used it, it definitely gave back. It was suddenly a platform for documenting the questions we needed answered, and the questions + answers we thought we already had. Months later, you can write better, stronger answers, after learning more. What were we doing before? Docs that fall out of date without obvious timestamps in github (at best) or confluence (shudder).
Backlinks
Trello has card-aging. Clawe Blog could use note aging. Stack Overflow has dates, so you can judge the age/relevance for yourself.
Is the data you're seeing still relevant? When was it written?
In my time at my last job, we finally arrived at stack overflow for internal documentation.
It's a wiki, but stack overflow also provides version control, voting, commenting, aging, etc, which serve as helpful visual data compression and a cheaper way to share if you're not up for written text.