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Hmm, I think (Atlassian) Confluence is quite awesome. While you can still replicate the mess you'd naturally have in Google-Docs or OneNote or other places, at

Hmm, I think (Atlassian) Confluence is quite awesome. While you can still replicate the mess you'd naturally have in Google-Docs or OneNote or other places, at least with Confluence if you have a coherent vision for how your organize your information you can create a very useful body of work. I've never seen a Google-Docs, OneNote, SharePoint, or other unstructured-info solution that doesn't devolve into turds-in-gelatin. I'll add as well (Atlassian) SourceTree (git UI). I don't want to be a git jockey and I can do 90% of what I need in the SourceTree UI -- it's saved me tons of time, and I especially like the chunk-stage/unstage/reset functionality (you can stage/unstage/undo fragments of files in the UI) -- this feature alone is gold. SourceTree performance has improved greatly. I only wish there were a Linux version, but fortunately I do most development on macOS. EDIT: SourceTree

nemothekid 6y ago
The bar for Confluence isn't Google Docs or OneNote. It's Notion or Coda. After using Notion I can't go back to Confluence, for the same reason I can't go back to any Atlassian product - it's way too slow and the UX is too convoluted.
- nateroling 6y ago
  Two things bother me about Notion as a documentation platform: no “plain” tables, and the potential for infinite unnecessary complexity with its databases. I love notion, but as a company-scale doc platform I don’t think it’s there yet.
monkpit 6y ago
> (you can stage/unstage/undo fragments of files in the UI) To be fair, this has nothing to do with SourceTree. You can do this with any git tool, since it’s a feature of git.
johnwalkr 6y ago
No matter what I’ve tried, nothing beats google docs for me (in a mixed discipline work environment). It has the familiarity of a folder structure, good collaboration features and version history that works well for non technical users. It works well enough that few users fall back on v2_final-edit naming nonsense. Other tools have a slight edge for organizing information, but no good way to keep both files and Documents together. Which means people use files locally and don’t keep them up to date on the system. It had 3 pain points for me that are resolved recently. First, they got rid of the desktop clients so users can’t move stuff to their desktop without understanding this is removing files for others. Second, team drives resolve the mess that was shared folders. Third, it can now edit office documents directly, avoiding the confusion of google doc copies appearing. I use confluence a lot and I never trust that files on it are up to date. It doesn’t quite have enough features to make “native” documents, so it ends up with a lot of content stored as attachments, which inevitably get updated and passed around by email. It’s not convenient for storing files so all of the miscellaneous small files never make it there. If you use a lot of addins, it becomes usable to make documents but since it’s atrocious at outputting files, eventually a final version of something needs to be edited in word and now it’s even worse, you have what looks like an up to date document but the latest version is a word file, which is either hidden as an attachment or not even uploaded. I can see it working well in a team of only software engineers, however.

nemothekid 6y ago

The bar for Confluence isn't Google Docs or OneNote. It's Notion or Coda. After using Notion I can't go back to Confluence, for the same reason I can't go back to any Atlassian product - it's way too slow and the UX is too convoluted.

nateroling 6y ago
Two things bother me about Notion as a documentation platform: no “plain” tables, and the potential for infinite unnecessary complexity with its databases. I love notion, but as a company-scale doc platform I don’t think it’s there yet.

monkpit 6y ago

> (you can stage/unstage/undo fragments of files in the UI) To be fair, this has nothing to do with SourceTree. You can do this with any git tool, since it’s a feature of git.

johnwalkr 6y ago

No matter what I’ve tried, nothing beats google docs for me (in a mixed discipline work environment). It has the familiarity of a folder structure, good collaboration features and version history that works well for non technical users. It works well enough that few users fall back on v2_final-edit naming nonsense. Other tools have a slight edge for organizing information, but no good way to keep both files and Documents together. Which means people use files locally and don’t keep them up to date on the system. It had 3 pain points for me that are resolved recently. First, they got rid of the desktop clients so users can’t move stuff to their desktop without understanding this is removing files for others. Second, team drives resolve the mess that was shared folders. Third, it can now edit office documents directly, avoiding the confusion of google doc copies appearing. I use confluence a lot and I never trust that files on it are up to date. It doesn’t quite have enough features to make “native” documents, so it ends up with a lot of content stored as attachments, which inevitably get updated and passed around by email. It’s not convenient for storing files so all of the miscellaneous small files never make it there. If you use a lot of addins, it becomes usable to make documents but since it’s atrocious at outputting files, eventually a final version of something needs to be edited in word and now it’s even worse, you have what looks like an up to date document but the latest version is a word file, which is either hidden as an attachment or not even uploaded. I can see it working well in a team of only software engineers, however.