Show HN: Stack Decisions – see why tools are being chosen

Show HN: Stack Decisions – see why tools are being chosen(stackshare.io)

70 points by yonasb 7 years ago | 10 comments

yonasb 7 years ago |

OP here- excited to show this to the HN community! Someone posted the intro blog post in another thread but our plan was to just show off the product so here it is! Decisions is a way to quickly explain a specific technology decision you made.

Twitter is great, blog posts are great, but we think there's an interesting medium (pun intended) that could be really helpful when you're trying to make a decision about a tool or putting together a workflow. Example: I like this one about payments because it's pretty descriptive https://stackshare.io/adrienjarthon/decisions/10114566434535....

We believe sharing technology decisions should be as commonplace as writing an organized and thorough README.md. Ultimately, our goal is to increase the net amount of knowledge about technology accessible to all developers, which in turn will help make you more productive at work.

Contributing Decisions gives you visibility amongst other developers who care about the tech you’re talking about, and gives you the opportunity to discuss the technical details associated with that decision.

As I mentioned in the other thread, our hope is that over time, you'll end up with this structured repository of discussions around technology problems/solutions for a wide range of use cases that you can come back to whenever you need help.

More details about the launch here: https://stackshare.io/posts/introducing-stack-decisions.

Would love to answer any questions or hear your feedback!

ukulele 7 years ago | |

I really like the idea of it if you can get critical mass. One concern I'd have is: given that people's livelihoods are often on the line, how do you keep it from devolving into Quora marketer-speak over time?

yonasb 7 years ago | | |

Thanks! I think there will be a similar challenge here, but we have community moderators (as of launch) and pretty strict rules around self-promotion. Example: some vendors (tool makers) wanted to write Decisions about their own product, but we explained why that's not helpful to developers and they understood. In many ways HN is really good at this, so the hope is that we can let the community moderate itself which seems like less of a thing on sites like Quora.

souprock 7 years ago | |

It's better than I expected, with C as an option. You seem to be missing everything else I use: assembly, linker scripts, machine code (bare hex opcode bytes).

gkoberger 7 years ago |

I've really been liking Stack Decisions. We have our engineering team write one up whenever they want to make a tech decision (to avoid knee-jerk changes without reason), and it's been great to see what people think of new products we're trying. StackShare itself has been helpful for a while, and decisions adds a ton of context.

Here's an example one we wrote: https://stackshare.io/gkoberger/decisions/101031322441323967

tbirrell 7 years ago |

Your scrolling is broken when the decision modal is open[0]. You should either let the background scroll behind the modal or prevent it entirely.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/XYe7pDE.gifv

yonasb 7 years ago | |

Thanks for reporting! The team is aware and on it.

karmakaze 7 years ago |

There are already too many general and intro postings. Also the postings are not very high density and slow to scan which only works if volume is kept low and focus tight.

yonasb 7 years ago | |

Thanks for the feedback! Would love some examples of ones you think are general/intro- we're manually curating to a certain extent so we want to make sure we know which ones the community generally doesn't find useful. The idea is that if you're logged in, you'll see Decisions relevant to your stack.

The posts aren't meant to be high density, so that's intended :)

karmakaze 7 years ago | | |

Low density is a good thing as long as it's combined with high focus.

My interpretation from the post title was that these would be stories about why certain tech was used on specific projects and just just posts about why so-and-so likes or dislikes such-and-such.

From the top listings right now, I consider these to be too broad/vague:

  - JavaScript for People Who Hate JavaScript
  - Rust 2018 is here… but what is it?
  - Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs
  - PyTorch 1.0 is out
  - Microsoft Edge is moving to Chromium

Each of those are either (a) Intro to __ or (b) general news/announcements.

And these ones are on point:

  - How Heap Built an Analytics Platform that Auto-Tracks Every User Event
  - M3: Uber’s Open Source, Large-scale Metrics Platform for Prometheus

There were many more fluffy posts before I got to the second 'on point' article.

I suspect that the site is more broad than the post title and that over time as there is more content, that it can be more focused and find it's essence. For me, I already have too many sources of broad content that I don't see adding another destination. Wish you the best of luck and hope to cross paths again and see how the site has evolved. Cheers.