5 ms·

After noticing that the growing number of people at my day job seemed to be using our internal jargon differently, I decided to write a team glossary using conf

by zizee 7y ago

After noticing that the growing number of people at my day job seemed to be using our internal jargon differently, I decided to write a team glossary using confluence. The experience left me wanting. No crosslinking of terms, no enforcement of structure/format. Ugly/outdated styling. I thought there had to be a better way, but I couldn't find one so I built Jargonaut (https://www.jargonaut.net https://www.jargonaut.net). It helps you build a nice, crosslinked list of terms/definitions, and provides simple slack integrations to allow you to pull in a definition into slack. I have lots of ideas to add more value, but I want to get a feeling from others on whether you would use such a specialized tool instead of your bog standard wiki. Would you consider parting with money for it for your team?

tln 7y ago
zizee, not for a glossary only. But, one of the top reasons we chose Slab (over Paper and Notion) because it lets us pull in content into Slack.
- zizee 7y ago
  Thanks Tin, I'll checkout Slab soon.
maxwelljoslyn 7y ago
There's a typo in the first entry of the demo glossary: "acroynms" should be "acronyms". I ran ispell and didn't see any other typos, though ispell is far from perfect.
- zizee 7y ago
  Thanks, fixed! :-)
gliese1337 7y ago
Are you familiar with termbases? There is in fact a whole industry with standardized data formats dedicated to solving exactly that problem.
- zizee 7y ago
  TIL. Interesting! My google-fu let me down :-) Time to do some digging. Thanks for the tip.
wes-k 7y ago
Great idea and I love the name!
- zizee 7y ago
  Thanks for the kind words. The system is still fairly MVP, but works well. I'm putting it out there early to determine appetite for a tool like this as I want to avoid going too deep before getting market validation.
The_Amp_Walrus 7y ago
I think it'd be a hard sell to smaller teams, but _maybe_ to organisations that are a bit older or larger and have accumulated a lot of internal cruft. I definitely think it would have been valuable at some of my previous workplaces: at one we had an event log with 12+ different types of transactions and no one in the office could tell me what all 12 meant. I found this out because I was tasked with telling a 3rd party what they meant =/ On a different note - have you consisdered doing some content marketing by making a public jargonaut for common development terms? My little brother is learning to code and he just asked me what the difference between .NET and C# was. I think learning programming is like this x10000 times. I've been daydreaming about making a public Wikipedia-style tech glossary site for at least a year or so. I think it'd be very useful but haven't gotten around to it (in a year so what does that tell you).
- zizee 7y ago
  > I think it'd be a hard sell to smaller teams, Yes, I suspect you are correct, which is my biggest misgiving about pursuing this product too much further. Unfortunately for me, new/small growing teams are my preferred niche! > maybe_ to organizations that are a bit older or larger and have accumulated a lot of internal cruft That's an interesting thought. That segment is a harder one to break into for a "solopreneur". > On a different note - have you considered doing some content marketing by making a public jargonaut for common development terms? Yes, I have actually. When trying to determine what other "glossary" solutions exists I found that there are quite a number glossaries that people appear to have put together as part of their content marketing play. One of the niches I could see Jargonaut fill is the place to go to publish a public glossary, although I am not sure the monetization angle there (apart from adverts).
kevindong 7y ago
One of the companies I interned at had an internal application that lived in the macOS menu bar where you could type in a company or org specific acronym/term and it would give you the human understandable definition. It was neat, but always incomplete.
- zizee 7y ago
  > It was neat, but always incomplete. One of the features I was thinking of building was a slack bot to ask people to add/update term definitions.

by zizee 7y ago

tln 7y ago

zizee, not for a glossary only. But, one of the top reasons we chose Slab (over Paper and Notion) because it lets us pull in content into Slack.

zizee 7y ago
Thanks Tin, I'll checkout Slab soon.

maxwelljoslyn 7y ago

There's a typo in the first entry of the demo glossary: "acroynms" should be "acronyms". I ran ispell and didn't see any other typos, though ispell is far from perfect.

zizee 7y ago
Thanks, fixed! :-)

gliese1337 7y ago

Are you familiar with termbases? There is in fact a whole industry with standardized data formats dedicated to solving exactly that problem.

zizee 7y ago
TIL. Interesting! My google-fu let me down :-) Time to do some digging. Thanks for the tip.

wes-k 7y ago

Great idea and I love the name!

zizee 7y ago
Thanks for the kind words. The system is still fairly MVP, but works well. I'm putting it out there early to determine appetite for a tool like this as I want to avoid going too deep before getting market validation.

The_Amp_Walrus 7y ago

I think it'd be a hard sell to smaller teams, but _maybe_ to organisations that are a bit older or larger and have accumulated a lot of internal cruft. I definitely think it would have been valuable at some of my previous workplaces: at one we had an event log with 12+ different types of transactions and no one in the office could tell me what all 12 meant. I found this out because I was tasked with telling a 3rd party what they meant =/ On a different note - have you consisdered doing some content marketing by making a public jargonaut for common development terms? My little brother is learning to code and he just asked me what the difference between .NET and C# was. I think learning programming is like this x10000 times. I've been daydreaming about making a public Wikipedia-style tech glossary site for at least a year or so. I think it'd be very useful but haven't gotten around to it (in a year so what does that tell you).

zizee 7y ago
> I think it'd be a hard sell to smaller teams, Yes, I suspect you are correct, which is my biggest misgiving about pursuing this product too much further. Unfortunately for me, new/small growing teams are my preferred niche! > maybe_ to organizations that are a bit older or larger and have accumulated a lot of internal cruft That's an interesting thought. That segment is a harder one to break into for a "solopreneur". > On a different note - have you considered doing some content marketing by making a public jargonaut for common development terms? Yes, I have actually. When trying to determine what other "glossary" solutions exists I found that there are quite a number glossaries that people appear to have put together as part of their content marketing play. One of the niches I could see Jargonaut fill is the place to go to publish a public glossary, although I am not sure the monetization angle there (apart from adverts).

kevindong 7y ago

One of the companies I interned at had an internal application that lived in the macOS menu bar where you could type in a company or org specific acronym/term and it would give you the human understandable definition. It was neat, but always incomplete.

zizee 7y ago
> It was neat, but always incomplete. One of the features I was thinking of building was a slack bot to ask people to add/update term definitions.