HN user

bry

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www.instructionpad.com 5y ago

Show HN: InstructionPad – Centralize your teams' “how-to” guides

bry
3pts1
discuss.email 6y ago

Show HN: Simple Group Email Discussion Lists

bry
3pts2
retrospective.co 9y ago

Side Projects Are Not Evil: Why Businesses Should Deliberately Encourage Them

bry
1pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

Side Projects Are Not Evil: Why Businesses Should Deliberately Encourage Them

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3pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

What They Don’t Teach You in College: How to Fast-Track Your Engineering Career

bry
2pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

Effective One-On-Ones: A Strategy Guide

bry
1pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

Managers and Seagulls

bry
1pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

Good, Fast, or Cheap: Pick Two

bry
1pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

It’s More Important to Be Right Than Nice

bry
1pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

How to Fast-Track Your Engineering Career

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1pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

Always Always Always Get Team Buy-In

bry
2pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

Always Always Always Get Team Buy-In

bry
2pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

The Curse of Knowledge

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1pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

Sorry, Devs: Our Job Isn’t Actually About Writing Code

bry
1pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

Seek First to Understand

bry
1pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

We Are Human Beings, Not Robots

bry
2pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

Sorry, Devs: Your Job Isn’t Actually About Writing Code

bry
1pts0
retrospective.co 9y ago

Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

bry
228pts270
the.freelance.guide 10y ago

Why Everyone Should Freelance (Even If You Love Your Job)

bry
2pts0
www.svpg.com 10y ago

Innovation vs. Execution

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1pts0
wordpress.org 11y ago

WordPress 4.0 is out

bry
8pts5
www.forbes.com 12y ago

EBay Hacked, Bleeds Data And Why You Need To Act

bry
1pts0
www.eweek.com 13y ago

Microsoft Sued Over Windows 8 Tiles

bry
3pts1
www.softwarebyrob.com 14y ago

The Inside Story of a Small Startup Acquisition (Part 3)

bry
63pts4
www.softwarebyrob.com 14y ago

It's Easy to Criticize from the Stands

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1pts0
news.cnet.com 14y ago

Did someone park a tank on Kim DotCom's lawn?

bry
1pts0
www.featurezen.com 14y ago

When Servers Explode: Relax, It's Probably Not As Bad As You Think

bry
1pts0
www.intermittentintelligence.com 14y ago

Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is

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3pts0
www.featurezen.com 14y ago

Show HN: My nights/weekends project - Simple Bug Tracking

bry
1pts0
www.intermittentintelligence.com 14y ago

Money Where My Mouth Is

bry
2pts0

The idea: Avoid the dreaded shoulder-tap more often by documenting your team’s most common “how to” guides in one place. Even better - convert any “how to” guide into a personal checklist that you can use to track your progress.

I like to think of “how to” guides like recipes for how to do something specific to your team. This site helps you create and organize them.

Background: I’m a software engineer, and more recently a software engineering manager at one of the FAANG companies (I’m not mentioning which one just to retain a tiny bit of anonymity). My point, though, is that even at huge established companies, having one place to share your team’s “how to” guides isn’t easy. My company has a huge internal wiki. It’s awful. Search sucks, and it’s like the Wild Wild West — no structure at all.

Some teams/companies try to solve this with “Knowledge Base” software, but I think what we need is a little simpler. Knowledge Bases are great for things like general information, strategy docs, and collaborative efforts… but not so much for straight-forward how-to guides (AKA SOPs or checklists).

At my current and all of my previous companies, we’ve always struggled with how and where to document our how-to guides/SOPs/checklists or whatever you want to call them. This grew out of my own need and I’m hoping to make something of it if other people find it useful too.

What I’d love feedback on:

1. Does the idea resonate? Does it apply to you and your team?

2. Does the messaging on the site make that clear?

3. I know it’s still pretty basic, but does it provide enough value right now to be considered an MVP that people might pay for?

4. What did you like?

5. What’s missing?

Thanks for taking a look and pointing me to TopicBox! There are some overlaps (team collaboration based on email), but I think that's ok. There is plenty of room for improvement in this area. My focus has been on simplicity. I don't think we need to re-invent the listserv concept necessarily - but I do see a huge opportunity to make group email discussion lists (mailing lists) much more streamlined, simple, and intuitive.

Making group collaboration easier seems like a win no matter what.

Its the "Forever" part that makes me not want to use it as much, because I'm afraid of actually liking it and coming to depend on it, and then it going away. I'd much rather just pay some modest amount and know that I'm contributing to a viable business than hope that the owners have a business plan that works with "Free Forever"

The most frustrating thing for me was the complete lack of any real communication from Microsoft. For awhile, even their status dashboard was down. I only found out about it after I got a PagerDuty alert and had to search Twitter (other people complaining about it) to confirm.

We have an Azure CDN backed by a Compute Instance, and zero official notice from Microsoft about this still. I've learned more about the problem from news articles than the company that provides the service. Fortunately we haven't finished migrating the rest of the site to Azure. No emails from them, nothing. Not even a tweet on their official @WindowsAzure account. Frustrating.

"For some reason, the logic on the east coast, and even in a lot of SV is, 'If you can code, then you can only code. Forever.'"

Unfortunately, that's not only an east coast thing. It seems to be related to the size of the company. The larger the company, the more they seem to feel/act that way :/

I suppose I could have re-branded it and generalized it a bit. I decided to move on partially because I was so turned off by the attitude of the Boy Scouts organization at the corporate level. At a local level, they all rock (I'm an Eagle Scout myself), but at the top corporate level, its a different story.

Perhaps I gave up too soon, but I've moved on. I'm well into my new project, which is certainly not sexy, but I'm excited about it.

I wrote and submitted this article to HN about a year ago. I've since moved it from a self-hosted Wordpress site to Posterous, which is probably why the dupe-checker didn't catch it (slightly different URL). A lot has happened since then. I'm still working toward my goal of doing my own thing (ironically, still working for someone else myself). When you're trying to create and market a bootstrapped business, its pretty easy to get distracted unless you have the ability to go full-time.

When I wrote the article, it was essentially me expressing my thoughts about how anyone if they want to (because not everyone does) CAN build something and start their own business, even without substantial capital. The barrier to entry is so low (comparatively speaking) that if you want to go out on your own as a developer, it is entirely possible. The post was meant to be encouragement to those who are interested, not sensational (although I did make some generalizations) :)

I actually built the original thing I discussed in the article (a service to manage Boy Scouts), and it got some great reviews and initial interest, but then the Boy Scouts wanted me to pay huge fees to license the term "Boy Scout" or use anything even resembling any of their trademarks. I decided to let that go and build something that does not piggyback on any other organization. That's what I'm working on now.

A year "lost" is a long time, but I haven't given up. I haven't lost anything other than time, since I was bootstrapping it and building it on my own time in the evenings. I won't be happy until I am doing my own thing. I'll post a follow-up with what I've learned and what has happened over the past year to anyone who is interested.

I need at least a brief description below your tagline. What do you mean by "TV"? An actual TV? Streamed over the net or something?. What do you mean by "control"? With my phone? Through a browser? I still have no incentive to sign up other than morbid curiosity. As interesting as your blog may be, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to saunter over there to read through it in order to figure out what your app/site does.

Looks great. Needs a little more substance (just a little).

I think you hit the nail on the head. So do I just need to take that risk with some idea that may work, rather than keep thinking about other cool ideas that also may work? I'm willing to risk/invest the time. Its just tough to stay focused.

Man, I wish I could. I have no savings, a wife, and four kids who depend on a steady salary. You're probably right, and maybe that would be the best thing to do... but I just can't take that leap yet. That's essentially why I work 4-5 hours every evening in addition to my day job - to have some glimmer of hope of being able to some day build something that takes off enough to allow me to leave this place.

Bummer. That was quick. Some poor guy was asking how to make the Internet (in general) faster. Lots of snarky responses.

Funny responses included stuff like:

"Pay more money to your ISP?" "You need to edit your internet.bat file" etc.

No doubt. That's the whole point of HN: Intelligent discussion. Your comments, however, are SO off-topic (SEO and how an organization like theirs has done so well at it) that it comes across as trolling.

Leaving .Net 16 years ago

Looks like his blog was previously on Tumblr, so the dup-detector didn't catch it.