Re:My blog is now generated by Google Docs
by leesalminen on Sunday May 10, 2020 @08:16PM
(#23137561)
We’ve been using a shared Google Docs folder to manage our app’s release notes. We parse the folder in reverse chronological order, paginate 5 at a time and use their doc to HTML converter API. We then cache in Redis for performance. Works great and keeps the development team away from having to update it. Product/support can edit to their content!
You mean your app's release notes go beyond just "- Bug fixes and misc. enhancements"? Good on you!
(Sorry for the seemingly drive-by, this really annoys me in Play Store update release notes!)
Re:My blog is now generated by Google Docs
by leesalminen on Monday May 11, 2020 @11:39AM
(#23143280)
Oh yes. We used to be lazy developers and do the bare minimum. We sell a SaaS to the SMB field and the feedback we got was that they wanted to know _exactly_ what we were changing in the app. So now we produce full sentence (or paragraph) explanations for every JIRA card that gets into production for our users, including links to updated documentation, training videos, screenshots, etc.
That's actually a really cool idea. We currently use a rendered Markdown doc but as a team who can forget and then have to do another commit, this would remove the friction required.
It's a really cool idea Google codelabs has been using for a few years to provide a unified way to write development tutorials[1].
That said, a bit of small, hopefully constructive feedback. The impact of this would be a bit bigger if there were more blog posts, so that by the time you reveal you're using google docs it feels more like a practical application and less like a very quick demo. Also, while I understand that there's a sort of "coder who doesn't do design" aesthetic, it might be good to at least change the colors a bit so that there's a bit more magic of transformation. This looks a bit too much like, well, a Google doc, and you want to establish that something cool is going on that couldn't be done with just an index of publicly visible google docs.