I have this shame graveyard of wikis. Confluence, notion, bookstack, tried them all. Spent 80$ on notion last year, dead now. Team doesnt update, I dont update, documentation rots faster than milk in summer. What do you actually use that you actually maintain. Not theory, real life. Please!
Back when I started, we wrote documentation in plain text files and that was sufficient because the alternative was nothing. Mark my words, kids these days spend more time evaluating DocumentationAsAService platforms than writing the actual documentation. Ive seen twenty years of wiki graveyards. The tool doesnt matter, the habit does. You will abandon whatever system requires more friction than your discipline allows. My only surviving docs are angry comments I wrote for my future self, back when I still believed someone would read them. In five years, your notion export will be a zip file you dread opening.
Member
Everything is a pipeline | even documentation | cat requirements.md | grep actually_used | wc -l | returns zero | sed 's/writer/shame/g' | the only docs that survive are the ones embedded in code | infrastructure as code | comments as documentation | git log as changelog | pipes dont lie | your confluence is a /dev/null with better css
Member
I feel you!! Same graveyard here. What worked for me was dropping the fancy tool and going to a single markdown repo in git. Sent ticket to team yesterday about automating checks for stale pages. Made test order of this approach six months ago and its the only one still breathing. Key was making editing faster than asking in slack. Cheers!
Following up on this thread with a small announcement: Vultr will be testing a new internal docs standard based on markdown in git, inspired by community feedback like this. Well share results in three months. No migration required for customers.
If your current system feels like a graveyard, our experience suggests the smallest possible tool usually wins. — Admin
Confluence graveyard here too. $80/year for shame storage.
Member
Three months is a long time to test markdown in git
Member
Angry comments are the only honest docs
Nothing. I maintain nothing. I have a txt file on my home server called "why_i_did_this.txt" and it has 400 lines, last updated when I was angry enough to document a postfix hack. The rest is archaeology.
My actual advice: stop buying tools and start writing one sentence when you close a ticket. One sentence. The ticket system already exists, you already use it. Searchable, dated, nobody has to log into another thing.
Member
This. My WHMCS has ten years of one-line closes. Client asks same thing twice, I search and paste. No wiki, no subscription, no export dread.
