- Pending code reviews - Unanswered support queries - Overflowing inbox - Increasing error logs - Operational stuff such as hiring, planning and other things
And while this never ending todo list is compounding; a new idea sucks out all the remaining attention. Pending tasks and new ideas meme
This is exactly what Adam and DHH discuss in the podcast: How his days are. And how he handles his other responsibilities when he is working on something new.
DHH shared an interesting idea. They "think of the business as a product in itself". They try to shape the company like a good product which is "easy to use, is self-explanatory and doesn't require to call support every 5 minutes."
I liked this analogy and mindset. How we can build the company that can run in its current form without requiring our assistance.
I thought about Screener in terms of "minimum requirements". What will one need to run Screener as a product? It will be 2 developers, 1 support person, 1 expert in financial data and 1 very experienced developer to lead whole tech.
Next, I thought in terms of "product manual". How will they learn how to run it? That's where we started working on a new Gollum Wiki.
I created a set of backend "manuals" some time back. I published it using mkdocs. The problem was it was a pain to maintain. Creating new markdown files, writing stuff, committing changes and pushing updates is too much work! No-one, including me, ever updated it.
Thinking about documentation, I like Plausible docs very much and took inspiration from it.
Himanshu and I moved the manuals to Gollum. It makes edits easy. It uses git in the backend. This provides the full version control, git-pull-push access, good ui and pages for latest changes.
We hooked up a few things to make it more usable:
Tree TOC: We created a custom tag to show folders like Plausible docs. Show sidebar of pages in tree structure with dropdown expansion.
Authentication: We used Omnigollum for authentication. It tags each commit properly with the right author.
Other things
VanJS: This is a very interesting library for building reactive components. No transpiling required. 1kb.
Yjs CRDT Algorithm: Another very interesting library and concept for creating collaborative programs. We have a wiki feature in Screener. We currently use diff-match-patchlibrary for it. May be, we can replace it with this CRDT algorithm in future.
