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Hi! I'm the Director of Product Marketing at Stack Exchange. It might sound like more work for us to use Github and markdown, but I see it as a huge plus. For n

Hi! I'm the Director of Product Marketing at Stack Exchange. It might sound like more work for us to use Github and markdown, but I see it as a huge plus. For non technical employees, this is a great opportunity to learn a new skill and collaborate with the engineering organization. Jon trained a few of us already... so far, so good!

allendoerfer 11y ago
Hi! While the change surely was not a huge investment I just do not believe that the benefits justify the costs. Since you wrote a blog post about it, I felt free to question your decisions. Nevertheless, now that it is done, I hope the new system works well for you. Maybe your team gets used to git for version control in other areas of work, too, which would be a huge win and ultimately prove me wrong ;-)
- alexa_scordato 11y ago
  I hope it works well too! Maybe I'll write a follow-up blog post in a few months and report back on our progress. In general, I think that marketers today should acquire some basic front-end knowledge and that knowing git and markdown is a good step towards getting there. Coding things like email templates and landing pages without the help of a designer or developer will be huge for us.
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    You will never be able to code email templates and that just shows how clueless you are as to the rabbit hole your devs have got you in to. Email markup is so arcane and complex at the moment that one mistake by your non-technical team will mean hours of pain. I know you want to support your colleagues, but they have made a bad decision which will make your job less doing the things you are good at and more dealing with things that should never have been your problem.
    - jc4p 11y ago
      This is really rude. I really want you to know that. I was going to tell you it _is_ possible to write e-mails in Markdown (use any Zurb template + make the message body editable via any Markdown --> HTML converter, then push it through a CSS inliner) but it seems more important to tell you that you are being very rude to someone who is very smart and one of my best friends.
      - mattmanser 11y ago
        What's rude about saying that he's vastly underestimating how complicated email templates are compared to, say modern HTML or simple markdown. He knows not what he says. If you'd ever created an email template you'd know it's really, really painful, full of hacks and takes practice and skill to work across a wide range of devices. For some marketing bod to claim the dev team are doing a great job because he'll soon be able to do emails himself just shows how little the devs have explained how hard this stuff actually is, and how limited markdown is. We've all seen this kind of nonsense before, devs making their own blogging engines out of duct tape and balsa wood. In the end, the fallout's never pretty. Also Disqus is bloody awful and you know it.
        jc4p 11y ago
        First of all: Alexa is a she. Secondly: i've done a _lot_ of e-mails in the past. I've handcoded tables for e-mails, I've used Zurb's templates, I've used Zurb's Ink, I run my own SMTP server and used to run transactional e-mail for a popular start-up. You're really sticking onto arguing the same point, but if you read Alexa's post she's not necessarily saying e-mails are going to be made in Markdown. Alexa is not an idiot, she's ran marketing for many big companies in the past and knows how HTML and e-mails work. All she's saying is getting her team to learn more technology is a great thing. By the way, the rude part of your message was "how clueless you are as to the rabbit hole your devs have got you in to" -- You are automatically assuming you're much smarter than someone just because they're in marketing, which trust me, is not true.
        Shog9 11y ago
        You realize this is the Stack Overflow blog, right? The site that hosts millions of posts written in Markdown every day? The one that's been sending templated emails written in Markdown for years? Separation of presentation and content, man. Learn it. You're right about Disqus though. Fortunately, there's Meta SO for real discussion.
danso 11y ago
Thanks for writing this...too many of us engineers treat non-technical employees as morons/infants, as if you didn't spend 12+ years of your life learning math and English and aren't able to cope with new text/symbolic systems...Learning Markdown is as easy/difficult as learning a rich-text editor...why do people assume that pressing a button with a cute icon on it is inherently easier than a Markdown convention? At least by learning the few Markdown conventions there are, you get some hands on experience with understanding how literal computer languages have to be...rather than forever treating rich text editors as a magical machine. God, the hours I've seen co-workers waste, trying to eliminate some errant space in a rich-text-editor-generated hyperlink, by pressing a random sequence of rich-text buttons. A lot of times, they just go straight to the raw HTML to fix things...and if you're already doing that, you're capable of learning Markdown (let's skip the discussion of why editing raw HTML can be even more disastrous). Kudos to you for being eager to learn new skills...I'm an engineer and a self-taught web dev I wish someone had forced me to learn Markdown much earlier than I had.

allendoerfer 11y ago

Hi! While the change surely was not a huge investment I just do not believe that the benefits justify the costs. Since you wrote a blog post about it, I felt free to question your decisions. Nevertheless, now that it is done, I hope the new system works well for you. Maybe your team gets used to git for version control in other areas of work, too, which would be a huge win and ultimately prove me wrong ;-)

alexa_scordato 11y ago
I hope it works well too! Maybe I'll write a follow-up blog post in a few months and report back on our progress. In general, I think that marketers today should acquire some basic front-end knowledge and that knowing git and markdown is a good step towards getting there. Coding things like email templates and landing pages without the help of a designer or developer will be huge for us.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  You will never be able to code email templates and that just shows how clueless you are as to the rabbit hole your devs have got you in to. Email markup is so arcane and complex at the moment that one mistake by your non-technical team will mean hours of pain. I know you want to support your colleagues, but they have made a bad decision which will make your job less doing the things you are good at and more dealing with things that should never have been your problem.
  - jc4p 11y ago
    This is really rude. I really want you to know that. I was going to tell you it _is_ possible to write e-mails in Markdown (use any Zurb template + make the message body editable via any Markdown --> HTML converter, then push it through a CSS inliner) but it seems more important to tell you that you are being very rude to someone who is very smart and one of my best friends.
    - mattmanser 11y ago
      What's rude about saying that he's vastly underestimating how complicated email templates are compared to, say modern HTML or simple markdown. He knows not what he says. If you'd ever created an email template you'd know it's really, really painful, full of hacks and takes practice and skill to work across a wide range of devices. For some marketing bod to claim the dev team are doing a great job because he'll soon be able to do emails himself just shows how little the devs have explained how hard this stuff actually is, and how limited markdown is. We've all seen this kind of nonsense before, devs making their own blogging engines out of duct tape and balsa wood. In the end, the fallout's never pretty. Also Disqus is bloody awful and you know it.
      - jc4p 11y ago
        First of all: Alexa is a she. Secondly: i've done a _lot_ of e-mails in the past. I've handcoded tables for e-mails, I've used Zurb's templates, I've used Zurb's Ink, I run my own SMTP server and used to run transactional e-mail for a popular start-up. You're really sticking onto arguing the same point, but if you read Alexa's post she's not necessarily saying e-mails are going to be made in Markdown. Alexa is not an idiot, she's ran marketing for many big companies in the past and knows how HTML and e-mails work. All she's saying is getting her team to learn more technology is a great thing. By the way, the rude part of your message was "how clueless you are as to the rabbit hole your devs have got you in to" -- You are automatically assuming you're much smarter than someone just because they're in marketing, which trust me, is not true.
      - Shog9 11y ago
        You realize this is the Stack Overflow blog, right? The site that hosts millions of posts written in Markdown every day? The one that's been sending templated emails written in Markdown for years? Separation of presentation and content, man. Learn it. You're right about Disqus though. Fortunately, there's Meta SO for real discussion.

danso 11y ago

Thanks for writing this...too many of us engineers treat non-technical employees as morons/infants, as if you didn't spend 12+ years of your life learning math and English and aren't able to cope with new text/symbolic systems...Learning Markdown is as easy/difficult as learning a rich-text editor...why do people assume that pressing a button with a cute icon on it is inherently easier than a Markdown convention? At least by learning the few Markdown conventions there are, you get some hands on experience with understanding how literal computer languages have to be...rather than forever treating rich text editors as a magical machine. God, the hours I've seen co-workers waste, trying to eliminate some errant space in a rich-text-editor-generated hyperlink, by pressing a random sequence of rich-text buttons. A lot of times, they just go straight to the raw HTML to fix things...and if you're already doing that, you're capable of learning Markdown (let's skip the discussion of why editing raw HTML can be even more disastrous). Kudos to you for being eager to learn new skills...I'm an engineer and a self-taught web dev I wish someone had forced me to learn Markdown much earlier than I had.