Show HN: RFC Hub

30 points by tlhunter 167 days ago | 11 comments

I've worked at several companies during the past two decades and I kept encountering the same issues with internal technical proposals:

- Authors would change a spec after I started writing code

- It's hard to find what proposals would benefit from my review

- It's hard to find the right person to review my proposals

- It's not always obvious if a proposal has reached consensus (e.g. buried comments)

- I'm not notified if a proposal I approved is now ready to be worked on

And that's just scratching the surface. The most popular solutions (like Notion or Google Drive + Docs) mostly lack semantics. For example it's easy as a human to see a table in a document with rows representing reviewers and a checkbox representing review acceptance but it's hard to formally extract meaning and prevent a document from "being published" when criteria isn't met.

RFC Hub aims to solve these issues by building an easy to use interface around all the metadata associated with technical proposals instead of containing it textually within the document itself.

The project is still under heavy development as I work on it most nights and weekends. The next big feature I'm planning is proposal templates and the ability to refer to documents as something other than RFCs (Request for Comments). E.g. a company might have a UIRFC for GUI work (User Interface RFCs), a DBADR (Database Architecture Decision Record), etc. And while there's a built-in notification system I'm still working on a Slack integration. Auth works by sending tokens via email but of course RFC Hub needs Google auth.

Please let me know what you think!

samuelstros 167 days ago |

Initial reaction: Looks too complicated & too niche of a problem to appeal to a sustainably large user group.

GDocs might be annoying to track who read the RFC etc. etc. but everyone is familiar with it.

I write RFCs, I share RFCs and your tool seems to require a substantial amount of buy in

- register

- unclear what the writing experience is

- outdated / overloaded UI

The last RFC I wrote was in hackmd (https://hackmd.io/Jjy-afCWS4CAFlHa62anMQ) because

- I wanted Markdown to store the RFC in git eventually

- Google Docs has issues with Markdown rouundtrips

- I didn't want to use git to write with VSCode (although... I actually did. I let CLaude Code write most of the RFC under my guidance, then put it into hackmd for easy sharing)

I hope the feedback helps!

tlhunter 167 days ago | |

Thanks for the feedback!

I agree that the UI is dated and can be a little overwhelming. The sample RFC (https://rfchub.app/rfchub/rfc1-org-batch-markdown-exporter-j...) shows what a proposal looks like with every single feature being used. Most of the time they'll look a bit simpler. I have a big UI overhaul planned but I'm hoping to get more real usage feedback on the core functionality first.

FWIW the editing process does use markdown, and the "download" link in the sidebar downloads a markdown file with YAML frontmatter to avoid vendor lock-in. RFC Hub has so much functionality that it's difficult to explain it all on the homepage. There is this overview document but it's honestly just overwhelming:

https://rfchub.app/blog/an-overview-of-rfc-hub

samuelstros 167 days ago | | |

> RFC Hub has so much functionality that it's difficult to explain it all on the homepage

That's what I meant with overwhelming / too niche.

It seems like you intend to productize the RFC process e2e. But most "time consuming" parts of an RFC process is the human stuff "Did you read this?" "Did you update the RFC again?" etc. That back-and-forth seems to be expressed by all the features you have in RFC Hub but:

1. That makes RFC hub complicated.

2. Requires buy-in from every party to participate in all of RFC hubs feature like "Yes, I reviewed it and pressed the reviewed button in RFC Hub"

1 & 2 combined make RFC Hub (likely) a very niche product. New users are overwhelmed. Existing users need to onboard new users (their collegues) though. Otherwise, the RFC process will fallback to just DMs on Slack. Only a few teams will have sufficient buy in from all team members.

anitil 167 days ago |

This would have been very useful at my previous job. We had a gdrive folder with '2024' or '2025' with a bunch of google docs with no inter-linking between them. If you were lucky the title would be vaguely related to the topic you are working on, and maaaaaybe there'd be a link to prior work. Frequently I'd look at an RFC, see no approvals but then find out it _had_ been approved but nobody actually updated the document. Infurating.

I'm not sure the reason for friction. These are developers, they know how to use git etc, but management prefers google docs I suppose (previous iterations were confluence, then markdown on github).

tlhunter 167 days ago | |

I'm glad to hear you would have found it beneficial!

I've definitely seen the same patterns at companies (and even introduced similar patterns).

The proposal linking was inspired both by IETF RFCs and by Jira issues. I love how both systems provide semantic meanings to such links (X obsoletes Y).

I do hope to marry the engineering love of markdown with management's love of WYSIWYG. Currently the proposal editing process is done via a syntax-highlighted markdown editor but in the future I'll add a WYSIWYG editor, then let users select a default mode.

anitil 167 days ago | | |

To be honest (and I'm just some rando so feel free to ignore me), if you have an MVP I'd say forget about development and sell what you have. You're already better than what I've seen in industry. If anything, being able to take an existing decision database and onboard it to RFC Hub (even if done manually) would be a better sell than WYSIWYG to enterprise customers.

badmonster 167 days ago |

What RFC standards or protocols can users browse on RFC Hub? Does it include IETF RFCs or is it focused on internal organizational RFCs?

tlhunter 166 days ago | |

There are zero IETF RFCs on it.