ddri

We are perhaps in something of a "quantum winter" at the moment, given the activity on the financial side of the QC industry as far as reverse listings, SPACs, and mergers have gone.

I work in this field as I find it compelling and the challenges of finding a worthy business case that applies beyond the fantastical potentials is one I feel worth my efforts/years. But equally open to failure where such yields an advance in our learning.

Aaronson is always an entertaining voice in the industry, although his focus on AI means less than I would hope to nudge us along at times. But he was in fine form at Q2B conference in Santa Clara recently, and I'm not anywhere near close to my contributions to the industry to ignore his thoughts as valuable to the discourse. Especially when pushing back on the emotional velocity we might have at times.

Thanks for the tip, going to try this on my personal site. More open source analytics with no tracking is always a good thing.

Thank you, this looks fascinating. Sounds like a great conference too.

Putting aside product strategy and Howard Hughes for a minute, it's worth paying respect to the Revue team. A little group of good humans in the Netherlands, creating a slick and well designed product in an otherwise competitive space. It's a testament to a lot of good work and the kind of energy that makes this industry such a joy at times.

It's also one of endless examples of the downsides of acquisition for users (if not the founder/team with equity, who know the game they're playing). I often think of the analogy of rich kids from dysfunctional families who buy a lot of cool stuff and don't really do much with it after their social signal moment. Been on both side of this to some degree in the industry and it's never fun to see the users let down at the end of it.

While this is part of what keeps the industry going, it would be nice to see more open source outcomes for such well designed products. But to end on a positive... well done team, hope you all go on to make awesome things again.

It's a sad thing to think of someone's grandchildren one day researching their family tree, and seeing all the blatant lies their family member said on behalf of... of all companies... Facebook. It's hardly the honourable legacy to be "talking head denying the thing that the company did, always does, and always will do".

Typo in the URL making it 404... but I'm sure most readers will work that out. Great to see quality podcasts on the history of open source like this. Being involved myself, there's a LOT of hilarious, strange, and very awesome moments in time I hope we manage to capture.

Good to consider. But also worth understanding the role that paying a bank interest has in defusing the "rent money is dead money" myth. Many property markets around the world are in a bubble, again, and inversely have competitive rentals, especially after the pandemic. Owning a home, with a mortgage, incurs often far more impact from the interest to the bank than if one simply rented. Let alone maintenance, rates, etc, let alone the illiquidity. I'd rather not have a house in Lisbon as a non-national when the nation hits another crisis.

Not to challenge the great point you make about CoL, but there's so much cultural distortion around home ownership that it's almost a parody of fundamental economics.

Beta user here. The phone ringing is literally my nightmare as the head a of product team. We are entirely remote and globally distributed, so async is our religion.

We were using Signal and Voxer together, as our specific use case requires nuance that voice is great for. We tried Loom but like Voxer, it just adds this linear playback experience that's so painful at scale.

Being able to speak in realtime, but review at a glance, is amazing. Verbz is indispensable to teams like ours in a kind of "it's so obvious you want voice and text at once" kind of way. The task allocation thing is already "hey that's cool" but seeing their roadmap, gets me excited. Of course, everyone and their dog will copy Verbz now, it's pathetic that Messenger and WhatsApp don't do this by default, so it's the "cool other stuff" they're adding that I'm curious to see. But even as a beta user I don't get shown everything so YMMV.

Beta user here. We use this at the management level. One of our core mgmt team has Android. They get the emails in the meantime. The benefit has outweighed any inconvenience - obviously any new product comes in stages - and we've used this as a force function to better understand how and why we work the way we do. HN more than anybody should get that tech takes time to developer even in parallel, but it's always entertaining to see people go off all the same. Our one Android user is cheering you on. Every nudge helps :P

Beta user here. We're a globally distributed remote team that works on a project with significant nuance/context that voice messages have been amazing for. We also work entirely async.

So the benefit for us has been using Verbz to do voice, with automagical transcription as well as source audio. The task allocated and personal notation is icing on the cake.

We're still working out what else we want or need, or how best to use this, but that really core (maybe really niche) use case for us has been amazing. It... just works. This will be a default product and feature set within six months. Easy.

Beta user here. I requested data export because it's part of my basic product due diligence when researching tools for my team. I have a bit of extra bias, I used to work for Red Hat, but really it's common sense. Especially when dealing with startups.

I sense from your other comments that you're in trolling mode, but if you're serious on this point, remember that user data freedom is a cultural signal that the team is committed to the best user experience. We proved this at Red Hat and it's the basic battle plan for SaaS these days. Any team that show me I'm not locked in is already building trust. Strange to see people arguing the opposite.

Verbz beta user here. Here's the problem I was having when I first met the team:

- Fully remote startup. I'm cofounder and CPO and running between meetings. Drowning under Slack, Asana, and Voxer.

I realised in our team context, voice was a really great way to put context into async collaboration, but really annoying to have to sit and listen to the whole message in realtime. Conversely voice-to-text alone misses the context of being able to listen when I want to. I wanted both at once.

I also realised that voice is super easy to send while in transit. And text is super easy to read. Best of both worlds. And then with Verbz automatically assigning tasks just by listening to my message, that was a breakthrough moment. Likewise just taking notes for myself it's great, as I hate typing on my phone when I've got lots to express, and I hate how iOS voice memos name and store. Plus I rarely actually go back and properly manage them.

Verbz is a no-brainer. The challenge is implementing in our team in a way where it doesn't get in the way of our JIRA-as-atomic-units-of-work workflow for the wider team. Our core management team however seems to fit this model nicely.

It's easily a product that the other apps will copycat as it gets traction. But it's not jammed full of ads or leaking my data so I'm happy for now. The team is really responsive, which is the bitter sweet part of early stage products - getting to feel like your suggestions are heard, but knowing that as they grow that's no always going to be the case as they get big. In the meantime, it's an instant RIP to Voxer for us.

A gentle reminder for anyone reading that "support@[company_name].com" is a pretty safe bet for anyone frustrated with the pattern of using bots or self-service funnels. If you're not sure if that's a valid address, a websearch will help confirmed that. Doing this for webflow results in the first result being:

"We provide email support Monday through Friday. ... We also might need the read-only link to your project and the email associated with your account. To contact our team, please reach out to us directly at support@webflow.com."

I've hit up Webflow support a few times this way (as a SaaS founder I actively avoid chatbots or delayed service funnels) and have found them to be amazingly fast and super detailed in their replies. It's partly what tipped me over to be a customer. In any case, I hope you get a quick reply to your query. And it did make me smile in a "very Hackernews" way that the first reply I saw to this wonderful post was a complaint :P

It sounds like you're in an environment that expects progress and creates a culture of "up or out". This isn't rare, and that situational awareness is a part of your information gathering to work out a response.

If this is truly the case, and staying in that role would be discomforting socially and professionally, then that's a useful framing. You can decide to use the appropriate time in that role to work out:

- what's the next move (up or out) - what value can be gained with the time remaining (it's now a mission!) - what are the potential moves if one takes their career in their own hands versus the org's preference for progress

I've been in exactly this situation. I got some "lucky" bumps up the corporate ladder early in my corporate career, which had the unintended consequence of maintaining that momentum and corporate expectation, while being fast tracked into this kinds of "leapfrog" roles.

The punchline is I chose to leave that industry and join another (a certain major open source software company), taking an enormous pay cut and lifestyle change. Which unlocked not only a lot of happy productivity doing good and meaningful work, but gave me the freedom to ultimately start my own company and have a larger impact... with a LOT less corporate performance art.

The "up or out" process isn't a bad thing. It's just a thing. How you choose to use or interact with it is discomforting, scary, and challenging, but ultimately is just another thing you have total agency over. Good luck, this sounds like a great life transition wrapped in the appearance of a socially awkward obstacle. You'll do great.

Working on a little side project using GAN AI as a method of illustration generation.

Especially interested in the context of the current "abstract human" sketch style. Expecting this will be inevitable within 12 to 24 months, and it's just a side project to help frame learning GAN, but it's bubbling along.

Designers will resist the first examples of these kinds of services, but it's really the marketing managers that will see them rise to prominence.

Being able to load a company style guide, and connect a repo of approved assets/components, and click to generate content in the context of the output requirements? It's simply going to exist. And designers will do what they (we) always do, and that is use the available tools to give more controlled nuance and meaning to the content across.

TL;DR... hiring designers to do this manually for now, and thinking how we enable everyone at scale (the next step beyond "just use Canva" which doesn't help the time-poor marketing teams).

Just want to say I'm grateful you took the time to share this lesson - there were some insights there I'll be thinking about ways to action on our side of things. Thanks!

Congrats on the progress so far. I can attest from spinning Corilla out of Red Hat and the journey we had with it, that there's always a niche for CMS or knowledge management tools.

Especially in the Series A to Series B segment, where ability to change, and necessity to remove complexity, meet the sudden availability of funds to assist. That's where your example of "you can pay X and hour for your engineer or Y a month for us to handle it" works well. How will you pitch this moving further up-market? Especially where the opex exists that dev costs are less important. And vendor lock-in (or likelihood of existing in five years) becomes an issue?

And further up the enterprise scale, the greater the demand for a robust open source community. Is this on your roadmap? If not, why not? Especially given you use Wordpress as an example, and most of the industry itself using open source as a basis for content engineering tools. It's now the default expectation. Even moreso with the likes of near competitors like Strapi being open source. Thoughts?

Your app library is nice, but much like Gatsby or Hugo... it's not "wow". Any plans to ramp up the devrel? How will you stand out from all the other headless CMS products? Especially with the likes of Contentful so well funded. Are you worried that the lack of open source cuts off the lower end of the market and community growth, and the war chest of competitors at the higher level of the market constrains your customer base somewhat?

And.. wat will CosmisJS look like in two and five years? What I love about CMS teams is the creativity and intent of the awesome people who run them, so I'd love to hear more about the big vision too! :)

It doesn't make sense. Plot twist: Silicon Valley is an interesting place.

That's a great example. I remember a lengthy thread about this on memo-list back when I was at Red Hat. Always made me smile.

It's also how we were able to spin out our company and raise VC on something inspired by experience, if not using the same code, as what we worked on internally. Having one of the Red Hat founders as our investor helped, but I just loved this attitude of "go build something awesome and keep in touch".

I hope your transition goes well!

Thanks for the feedback w3clan. I like the approach you're going with tutorials although I struggle with the usability. This is an issue that plagues the developer community and something we faced building PressGang CCMS at Red Hat prior.

We took over 2/3 of Red Hat's global software documentation with our internal "just for us" tool in the first year of prototyping it. But ultimately we needed to learn a lot about the increasing focus on UX. Plus we learned that, surprise to nobody but us, writers just want to write.

You can see this trend with Dropbox acquiring Hackpad. Collaboration with attention to design workflow is very important. The ability for teams to create content easily is of utmost importance. As LEw Platt famously said:

> "If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive."

Corilla's "Collections" module is like nothing else, and that's the real power of the product. Once you try it, there's no going back to "notes" or "documents"... and why would you? The ability to create content, and then grab it as a dynamic group as and if needed - plus push it to a private or publish HTML build in literally seconds? You can see why we've grown so fast.

Looping back around - I would caution investing too much time in tutorials without attention to UX and the design experience for the reader. Our buddy Eric over at Read The Docs is the default host for open source docs, where design matters less, and services like Udemy have raised the bar on LMS and tutorial experiences. Those to me are both extremes, and there's more LMS swarming every day.

IMHO the focus is on overall experience of managing information as a team, and I'd encourage others to join us in tackling this. That is, after all, where both the greatest problems and greatest budget are being directed.

Hi all. This is David from the Corilla team here.

Corilla is a collaborative documentation tool for software teams. It solves the problems of a core workflow for writing, managing and publishing software documentation.

We're currently in the process of preparing version two of Corilla, so I thought I'd take some time to get some community feedback.

We do this by offering a hosted Markdown editor, saving to an internal repository of topics that are accessed by a novel "collections" mode. This lets you collect groups of topics in dynamic folders but tag/context/theme (the missing feature from Evernote or Google Docs), and publish as private internal or public HTML exports in seconds.

There's a whole host of workflow enhancements for technical writers, developer advocates, dev docs, etc. One I enjoy most days is the screenshot workflow - just copy and paste an image and Corilla takes care of the back end hustle (this used to be a mammoth task at Red Hat, now just as simple as copypasta directly into the UI and directly into a version controlled repo).

We also recently announced free docs hosting [0], so the full workflow from "as many writers on the same doc as you want" to "published to hosted docs service" in a few clicks. Again - I wish I had this at Red Hat.

The intention isn't to replace static docs or the "docs as code" movement, but to solve the problem we faced at Red Hat in enabling non-technical teams to... just write.

We're in use in over 85 countries now and starting work on a new version based on our incredible community feedback. Would love to hear your thoughts.

[0] https://medium.com/corilla-blog/corilla-hosts-your-documenta...

Interesting to see this posted, as this wasn't particularly widely used even at Red Hat. And the timestamps for revision history show you that it's of a certain era.

What I would recommend is something like the MailChimp style guide: http://styleguide.mailchimp.com/

The upside here is that those teams are small and centralised and obsessive over the tone of their product. The same goes for other SaaS companies like Intercom (Elizabeth is an amazing content strategist). They have to be.

For context, I'm an alumni of the Red Hat content team, which I joined from a corporate background and was frustrated to see the team relied on the IBM Style Guide. I pushed for Red Hat to make a canonical open source style guide, as I researched common patterns across engineering and tech writing that can create disparity in UIs or APIs if one group ends up writing one way, and another the other.

For various reasons this wasn't a feasible project so my team focused on tooling instead (creating the PressGang CCMS internally, and then I took funding from one of the Red Hat founders to launch Corilla, a collaborative publishing tool for technical writers considered "the GitHub for content teams").

This style guide here is at best a reference for the kinds of things you might want to consider if you're building one for open source. In my era this guide was pretty useless though, as the content team voted for a strange hierarchy of style guides going from the IBM, then the CMoS, then the American Heritage dictionary, and then this guide. Or maybe some variation - nobody paid attention and we all just used the IBM and had opinions.

This is why the smaller SaaS companies make the best style guides (and the MailChimp one is not only creative commons so you can use it too, but not stuck in the awful DocBook XML format!).

thisonemademelaughoutloud

Thanks for your feedback, and absolutely. We're in beta now and the HTML output (going to S3) was useful for validation of the workflow. We're working on the output formats and API at present - a lot of our beta users like Corilla as a kind of technical writing IDE, which is very interesting.

If you have any specific output requests/formats, drop me a line anytime.

This is a great question, and one that I love seeing emerge with surprising regularity in our dev community.

A few thoughts below. For context, I was a technical writer at Red Hat before spinning out the content tool I cofounded. I'm the cofounder of Corilla, a publishing tool for technical writers... Corilla is like Github for content teams (http://www.corilla.com).

Peer review

When asking for peer review, you will mostly get people pointing out a few minor things and moving on. Doing in-depth reviews are really hard, so it's just human nature to find a few things to comment on and fulfil that emotional contract.

Building up a small circle of very close collaborators for peer review is very helpful. But it's hard work - for example I'm in Boston this week, and I made sure I did a deep-dive on a new content deck sent over from another founder from our NUMA accelerator alumni in Paris. Pay that ^&$& forward first.

Technical writing versus marketing

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, technical writers openly mocked sales and marketing. Then something called "Google" happened, and writers that didn't take the time to appreciate that every page is now page one suddenly found their career prospects shrinking.

Technical writing is a very specific art, but one that is broadening widely. I look at "technical writer" in the same way as "full stack engineer". The oldskool days of learning dry and emotionless technical writing were kind of like an engineer getting down with LAMP. Ditto how IA and HCI has blossomed into UX.

The best technical writers understand the power of their content and how it intersects with the needs of the reader. And some of those readers are making purchasing decisions. So you can either argue about "technical writing has become content marketing", or you can learn as much as possible to improve your ability to write the right content for the right persona at the right time. Right?

Clickbait titles

Personally I hate them and avoid content because of them. Unless I encounter them because of a trusted referral in my network. Or if the body content is enough to drive my user journey towards that content.

Your case will depend on your target demographic. Are they inclined for clickbait titles? Are they mostly referred by trusted sources/social media? Are they driven by google (or, lol, Bing)?

Graphical aids

I worked with a manager once that was proud that they never watched videos and hated graphics. That was a great experience, because much of the universe is the opposite.

I can list off a lot of figures that support the conversion/retention/activation power of these other forms of content, but it's 2016. We don't have to. It's not even a debate anymore.

The challenge is that they ALL work. Most of us grew up reading MAN pages, right? So what? A good technical writer has to and loves to test the content preferences of their users.

I wouldn't suggest you learn Photoshop necessarily. You could use Freelancer/Upwork to get some expertise in. If you want to DIY, get a design buddy (or pay a few bucks on Upwork to get taught) how to use Sketch and Marvel/InVision. The design space is shifting quickly.

Get better at technical writing?

Join the Write The Docs community. Seriously. Eric is probably reading this thread right now (g'day!), and they are just a wonderful global community of diverse technical writers. The WTD conferences are super sweet too.

Hope that helps. Ping me directly anytime, I live in this space and love to help.

Thanks for the post - I was thinking about the database issue you touch on in the Postgres section. Keep us posted on that!

Thanks for your kind words! Jump on the beta and we can chat more. Oh and hit this survey up to help us understand the experience of other tech writers: https://corilla.typeform.com/to/QzDe45

We're constantly testing and analysing this stuff, and I'm going to open source the results as usual (so take note if you've got a similar project, there's a power in choice and collaboration).

Corilla is a project based on something we cofounded while working on documentation for Red Hat. It predates Readme.io by a number of years as an open source project, and we're recently taken the challenge to provide this as an external service.

I'm very excited to see such great choice arriving for documentation, including Readme.io. I would classify Readme as a great tool for developers to document their APIs. Corilla is a more end-to-end tool for tech writers to deliver content geared towards customers.

I'd love to explore this further but I'm sitting in the hotseat of a team at Startup Weekend here in sunny Brisbane, and I fly out to Paris tonight to speak about our experiences building our content tools as an internal corporate startup... if anyone is attending Open World Forum 2014 come and say hi!

If you want to chat, troll, discuss, or get involved with our awesome beta, grab me on @davedri.