
Ask HN: How do you use Confluence? - ahmadassaf
Maybe the question here has multiple parts:<p><pre><code>  - What do you use to organise and curate your team&#x27;s and&#x2F;or company&#x27;s knowledge
  - What would be the best practices followed to ensure that things do not get messy, out of hand quickly
</code></pre>
Confluence can be the choice of a Wiki&#x2F;Documentation hub for many, how can you apply the best practices
from point 2 in Confluence
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4thaccount
Have a flexible heirarchy and build lots and lots of pages. When I learn
something new I document with a background explaining things and dilimenate
into clear sections with explantations and code snippets, documents, and links
where necessary. If I find an old page that is now irrelevant, I delete it.
When the heirarchy needs to be reorganized we add/delete sections and move
pages around no problem. 99% of my team's doc is written by me and one
teammate (hundreds of docs).

I know people that are nitpicky want to spend hours arguing over the perfect
way to organize things, but it ain't worth the time. What is important is that
you document lots and lots of stuff and can find specific things via search +
keyword.

~~~
ahmadassaf
Do you rely more on heirarchy or labels/tags and rely on the powerful search
of confluence? Also have you tried Confluence for personal use or only
professionally (I am thinking of moving away from Evernote but am afraid
Confluence is an overkill)

~~~
4thaccount
Professional. I'm an electrical engineer (not a developer), but I write plenty
of code in various languages and we have lots of systems we support. I'm not
sure what labels/tags are, but find the search seems to work extremely well
regardless.

We have a query section that has dozens of queries broken up into use cases
and each has a short description, so if someone spent a day writing a 2 page
query, you can find and use it quick without digging around too much.

One thing that frustrates me is that the language support is super limited in
some ways. Yea it has a fair amount of languages, but there are so many more
and grabbing the syntax support from notepad++ can't be that hard for their
devs. It isn't GitHub or anything, but if you need an easily assessible place
for some utility scripts it is perfect as you can document the usage in much
the same way as a Python notebook.

