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Comment by ihnorton | Hacker News Reader

I've heard several times about the Stripe "Library" and "written culture", both in previous patio11 posts [1] and elsewhere. I understand part of that comes from the top and screening for writers. But I'm also curious about the basic mechanics of the library; wordpress? big ol' mediawiki? git repo of markdown docs? custom software?

How has the library process (if any) itself changed over time?

I've worked at non-startup BigCo/healthcare with formalized procedural docs, (technical) writers, change management, etc., and often they were minimal, boring, impersonal, frequently outdated -- and rarely read. I'm imagining (for better or worse) this is something a little more like a shared internal blog archive?

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/

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I work at Stripe. From a quick browse through my inbox and Chrome tabs, I see multi-thousand word documents in: Google Docs, Dropbox, markdown in Git, internal wiki, _other_ internal wiki, email to mailing lists, custom software, and internal wiki pages generated from markdown in Git.

All of these tools have weird superpowers and limitations that prevent them from becoming a unified catalog. Google Docs can do live concurrent editing between 40 people but can't relax width limits (e.g. for code listings), and ${WIKI_SOFTWARE} can embed every document format in the world but can't require certain pages to be changed via code review.

There's another internal meta-tool that acts like a search engine across the various vendor platforms, so I can search for [network egress policy] and be assured of somewhat reasonable results.

I am also very curious about this. I've been keeping track of knowledge mgmt tooling (esp. plain text) and approaches (e.g. ADR) for a couple years. Grand Unified Theory forthcoming :)

I may be mistaken here, but I think Patrick may be referring to the library of Stripe Press published books, which are available internally (and externally, if purchased)?

https://press.stripe.com/

Believe they're referring to:

"Stripe is a celebration of the written word which happens to be incorporated in the state of Delaware. We produce prodigious amounts of it internally, most of it widely visible within the company." - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/

Yes, that.

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