Ask HN: Does Confluence still suck today?
Last I checked, it was slow, had poor UX and extremely trash search. What's your experience been like? I avoid using it at work. I do write up extensive comments in JIRA (I am 100% satisfied with our specific JIRA) and also in code instead. What part of Confluence makes you avoid it the most? Creative take on having "docs" in JIRA! But, why not use something else which was designed with extensive documentation in mind? There are many solutions I believe. Any specific reasons? When I'm working on a ticket I document any research I do on the problem in comments in the ticket and sometimes it is a lot of research (including the way it's 'spozed to be) If anything at all is not right I write a up a ticket which goes into detail about what's wrong and what I think is right. It wouldn't be a good place to put documentation for, say, how the data team is supposed to do a process, but I sure will write detailed documents for procedure I do to set systems up for my work and how my tester can set up situations. If it has anything to do with the ticket I think it is fair game and personally I find stuff like that easy to find because I have JIRA open all day and use it as my "second brain" to keep up with the work I do. (e.g. I think I had something done Dec 24 but didn't have time to make the PR because I wanted to do a round of checking out, but because I have detailed notes I'll be quick to get started at the end of the year.) Similarly, I am not one to write a lot of little comments in the code apologizing for why it is hard to understand, I think is better to use longAndDescriptiveClassFieldAndMethodNames and clean up anything that you want to apologize for. On the other hand I write long comments in certain places of the code that explain the organization of the system, details of how it works, conventions used, etc. It is good for me but I can also tell Junie, "I want you do add some tests for the work we just did, take a look at ... to see how we write tests for this sort of thing" --- So far as Confluence goes I find it slow, awkward, hard to find things (in the sense of the search tools being bad but also easy to put things in the wrong place), and not necessary for my daily workflow. If I got in the habit of using it I'd be used to it, but I can go a year and not have to look at it, even though I think there is IT documentation in there. We have a data team that uses it every day and they are disciplined with it and I never hear complaining about it. If I need to know something about the way they do things I usually go knock on their door and ask. Confluence still fucks your eye when all you want to do is type. Confluence still drops documents into the black hole of zero discovery (I’ve regularly written documents that I cannot later locate). You still regularly fight confluence formatting to try to get your documents to look right.
God help you if you deliberately or accidentally end up with a bulleted list. It is still the worst software I have encountered in my life. (Teams may be worse, I don’t have the energy to split hairs on first or second) If I’m forced to use confluence I require a pre-arranged location that the whole team bookmarks, I write in a raw text editor and paste into confluence, and I time box formatting to 15min if it looks like ass after that that’s what you get. However, I’ve met someone who swears by it. But he his use case sounded like a good time for Google Sheets which he was forbidden from using for political reasons so…