Possibly because a large number of organisations don't really have a good system for capturing somethings as "messy" as notes.
I'm not big on note taking myself, but when I do, the things I capture is very different from the version I put into the official documentation.
There is a good article: A rational design process, how and why to fake it.[1] Basically how we reach our goal and how we present them are two different things. The personal notes have the details on failures, wrong turns and alternative ideas, the official documentation won't have that.
Confluence search is very good.... At finding stuff in PDFs. Search in Confluence is bonkers. Super easy to locate term, know to only exist in one document, and Confluence will return that one PDF that someone uploaded, which for some reason also have that term. It's odd that the search is so poor at searching Confluence pages, yet so good at searching PDFs.
> Possibly because a large number of organisations don't really have a good system for capturing somethings as "messy" as notes.
To build upon this point, there's a problem that writing docs is a thankless job: those who benefit from it do so silently, whereas those who selflessly shared notes later can find themselves involved in issues they have no involvement.
Because it's less friction to put it there? Because only he can find it in the sparse context it lives in? Because he can use it then for multiple projects, and might he change, multiple companies? Because that way it's his and not the companies? Imagine leaving a job and all you learned stays at that job instead of with you?
I started doing this, because my company goes through too many re-orgs and tool changes. If I capture it in my personal notes, I don't have to worry about re-doing everything when the org changes, or losing something I may need if I'm moves away from the area where those notes were kept.
I'd love to have a universal shared notes system for the whole team, but it's proven unrealistic when seeing how things work over decades.
With my former team I wrote 90% of the documentation. A while after I left they had to migrate their docs to a new system, and used it as an opportunity to clean up. I went back to try and reference a 20 page doc I wrote, going very in depth on a topic during a period where I was deep into it. Gone. I wish I had kept my own copies instead of relying on the shared platform. There was still a lot of good and relevant information in that document, but the people going through it lacked the knowledge and context to see it. There have been many examples like this.
There are also things that don't seem like they deserve a note in a formal system. One day thing X broke and we found out we had to talk to person Y to fix it. No one else thought to write it down, but I did. It broke again yesterday, and I was able to quickly bring up the name of who to talk to, while everyone else just tried to remember and hunted through their chat history. Search of my local notes (in Obsidian) works much better than Confluence. The low friction also means it's easy to drop stuff in, even if it might not be that useful. The friction on Confluence is higher. I tried keeping all my notes in there once, so I could easily share them with others if/when needed, but it was too much effort, and only a matter of time before it goes away and we move to something else (that's happening to some degree right now).
Because then it spares you the maintenance of bullshit? The moment you put something public, there are 10 wise-asses that will start bikeshedding about MD flavor, where to put it, who maintains it, can we automate it, can you update this, can we expand it, etc.
