HACKER Q&A
📣 dennisy

How do you manage disparate docs


I am interested in how people centralise (or do not) documentation from multiple git repos, into knowledge base. We have many small services each with a Readme, articles here and there etc.

I feel I need to centralise them in some automated fashion to have a single place where people can find technical content both engineering and data science.


  👤 Juliate Accepted Answer ✓
As time goes and if you ever grow, you will get more and more sources of info, on which you do not necessarily have control (from the extreme "it's managed by a vendor" or "it's public, useful reference info" to the other extreme "it's a new idea from the junior in the team").

What matters is indexing (for search) + cataloging (for structured discovery) the contents + managing access to it (because not everyone may be entitled to it, sometimes even not to its existence).

You need a portal application/website that manages at least the 2 first, and always point your people to this portal first.

It may be overkill when you're a small structure, but as you grow, and as you need to have processes for more and more things, this becomes a time- and org-saver.

Because as you grow, and with time, you will inevitably face diverse teams having different preferences as to how manage/set/reform their own documentation. You don't want to block that, you want to keep track of it.

Separating the index/catalog of the documentation from its various sources helps you keep track and manage on one hand, and helps your whole teams to keep information available to all.


👤 PaulHoule
All in git with reasonable formats like markdown?

Could you make something that indexes these in (say) Elasticsearch?