
Show HN: Stack Decisions – see why tools are being chosen - yonasb
https://stackshare.io/feed
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yonasb
OP here- excited to show this to the HN community! Someone posted the intro
blog post in another thread but our plan was to just show off the product so
here it is! Decisions is a way to quickly explain a specific technology
decision you made.

Twitter is great, blog posts are great, but we think there's an interesting
medium (pun intended) that could be really helpful when you're trying to make
a decision about a tool or putting together a workflow. Example: I like this
one about payments because it's pretty descriptive
[https://stackshare.io/adrienjarthon/decisions/10114566434535...](https://stackshare.io/adrienjarthon/decisions/101145664345355751).

We believe sharing technology decisions should be as commonplace as writing an
organized and thorough README.md. Ultimately, our goal is to increase the net
amount of knowledge about technology accessible to all developers, which in
turn will help make you more productive at work.

Contributing Decisions gives you visibility amongst other developers who care
about the tech you’re talking about, and gives you the opportunity to discuss
the technical details associated with that decision.

As I mentioned in the other thread, our hope is that over time, you'll end up
with this structured repository of discussions around technology
problems/solutions for a wide range of use cases that you can come back to
whenever you need help.

More details about the launch here: [https://stackshare.io/posts/introducing-
stack-decisions](https://stackshare.io/posts/introducing-stack-decisions).

Would love to answer any questions or hear your feedback!

~~~
ukulele
I really like the idea of it if you can get critical mass. One concern I'd
have is: given that people's livelihoods are often on the line, how do you
keep it from devolving into Quora marketer-speak over time?

~~~
yonasb
Thanks! I think there will be a similar challenge here, but we have community
moderators (as of launch) and pretty strict rules around self-promotion.
Example: some vendors (tool makers) wanted to write Decisions about their own
product, but we explained why that's not helpful to developers and they
understood. In many ways HN is really good at this, so the hope is that we can
let the community moderate itself which seems like less of a thing on sites
like Quora.

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gkoberger
I've really been liking Stack Decisions. We have our engineering team write
one up whenever they want to make a tech decision (to avoid knee-jerk changes
without reason), and it's been great to see what people think of new products
we're trying. StackShare itself has been helpful for a while, and decisions
adds a ton of context.

Here's an example one we wrote:
[https://stackshare.io/gkoberger/decisions/101031322441323967](https://stackshare.io/gkoberger/decisions/101031322441323967)

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tbirrell
Your scrolling is broken when the decision modal is open[0]. You should either
let the background scroll behind the modal or prevent it entirely.

[0]: [https://i.imgur.com/XYe7pDE.gifv](https://i.imgur.com/XYe7pDE.gifv)

~~~
yonasb
Thanks for reporting! The team is aware and on it.

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karmakaze
There are already too many general and intro postings. Also the postings are
not very high density and slow to scan which only works if volume is kept low
and focus tight.

~~~
yonasb
Thanks for the feedback! Would love some examples of ones you think are
general/intro- we're manually curating to a certain extent so we want to make
sure we know which ones the community generally doesn't find useful. The idea
is that if you're logged in, you'll see Decisions relevant to your stack.

The posts aren't meant to be high density, so that's intended :)

~~~
karmakaze
Low density is a good thing as long as it's combined with high focus.

My interpretation from the post title was that these would be stories about
why certain tech was used on specific projects and just just posts about why
so-and-so likes or dislikes such-and-such.

From the top listings right now, I consider these to be too broad/vague:

    
    
      - JavaScript for People Who Hate JavaScript
      - Rust 2018 is here… but what is it?
      - Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs
      - PyTorch 1.0 is out
      - Microsoft Edge is moving to Chromium
    

Each of those are either (a) Intro to __ or (b) general news/announcements.

And these ones are on point:

    
    
      - How Heap Built an Analytics Platform that Auto-Tracks Every User Event
      - M3: Uber’s Open Source, Large-scale Metrics Platform for Prometheus
    

There were many more fluffy posts before I got to the second 'on point'
article.

I suspect that the site is more broad than the post title and that over time
as there is more content, that it can be more focused and find it's essence.
For me, I already have too many sources of broad content that I don't see
adding another destination. Wish you the best of luck and hope to cross paths
again and see how the site has evolved. Cheers.

