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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.

Also relevant: http://www.inc.com/jim-schleckser/why-netflix-doesn-t-tolera...

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"

Its there, just not published to that page yet. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Changelog/4.0

You can opt out of Shared Endorsements (mentioned in the new ToS) here: https://plus.google.com/settings/endorsements?hl=en

Seems accurate: http://rabid.bunnies.arelikefacebook.com/

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.

Essentially a duplicate from just two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577624

I wondered about that too for "Four Steps to the Epiphany" until I saw this post on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-book-Four-Steps-to-Epiphany-...

Essentially he wants people to be able to use it as a workbook, and not as a quick read (if that's even possible).

Any idea when the book will actually ship? I know it goes to press Feb 14th, but when can we actually expect it in our mailbox?

"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 think you missed the point. It was meant to be inspirational to those who WANT to. There are no valid excuses if you WANT to.

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).

That's the theory, but in reality there are likely members that are more influential than others. Not official leaders perhaps, but a form of leader nonetheless.

Not sure I agree, but I submitted this article because I'm interested in the inevitable discussion to follow.

Pretty soon we're going to need an extension to hide all the IPO stories ;)

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.

^ Oh look, a throwaway account. I wonder who created it :/

Good point. Also, "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them." (e.g. religion)

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.

Stay on topic and take your trolling elsewhere

You made a valid argument with your first comment, but your second comment ("furthermore...") has nothing at all to do with the article or SEO. Go troll somewhere else.

Seriously? Clearly I didn't.

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