Markdown

So I am a huge fan of Jira like #massive I used it for many many years, and really loved it, used it personally and at work. I would suggest every new workplace that I worked at to switch to Jira instead of what I was using.

When I started at #StackShare we were using a Trello #Kanban board and I was so shocked at how easy the workflow was to follow, create new tasks and get tasks QA'd and deployed. What was so great about this was it didn't come with all the complexity of Jira. Like setting up a project, user rules etc. You are able to hit the ground running with Trello and get tasks started right away without being overwhelmed with the complexity of options in Jira

With a few #TrelloPowerUps we were easily able to add GitHub integration and #storyPoints to our cards and thats all we needed to get a really nice #agile workflow going.

I'm not saying that Jira is not useful, I can see larger companies being able to use the Jira features and have the time to go through all the complex setup to get a really good workflow going. But for smaller #Startups that want to hit the ground running Trello for me is the way to go.

In saying that what I would love Trello to implement is to allow me to create custom fields. Right now we just have a Description field. So I am adding User Stories & How To Test in the Markdown of the Description if I could have these as custom fields then my #Agile workflow would be complete.

#StackDecisionsLaunch

For Stack Decisions I needed to add Markdown in the decision composer to give our users access to some general styling when writing their decisions. We used React & GraphQL on the #Frontend and Ruby & GraphQL on the backend.

Instead of using Showdown or another tool, We decided to parse the Markdown on the backend so we had more control over what we wanted to render in Markdown because we didn't want to enable all Markdown options, we also wanted to limit any malicious code or images to be embedded into the decisions and Markdown was a fairly large to import into our component so it was going to add a lot of kilobytes that we didn't need.

We also needed to style how the markdown looked, we are currently using Glamorous so I used that but we are planning to update this to Emotion at some stage as it has a fairly easy upgrade path rather than switching over to styled-components or one of the other #cssInJs alternatives.

Also we used React-Mentions for tagging tools and topics in the decisions. Typing @ will let you tag a tool, and typing # will allow you to tag a topic.

The Markdown options that we chose to support are tags: a, code, u, b, em, pre, ul, ol, li.

If there are anymore tags you'd love to see added in the composer leave me a comment below and we will look into adding them.

#StackDecisionsLaunch

In Uploadcare we like to write internal documentation and instructions for all occasions. We used Confluence before, but strong and very slow UI fall us to frustration. We start to research alternative and met Slite. The ability to quickly create notes and search, great onboarding, the familiar interface in Slack style, useful shortcuts, nice code snippets, support of Markdown. Now writing instructions and team notes have become much more pleasant.

Jekyll is an open source static site generator (SSG) with a Ruby at its core which transform your plain text into static websites and blogs.

It is simple means no more databases, comment moderation, or pesky updates to install—just your content. As said earlier SSG uses Markdown, Liquid, HTML & CSS go in and come out ready for deployment. Lastly it's blog-aware permalinks, categories, pages, posts, and custom layouts are all first-class citizens here.

I chose Noticeable for it's simplicity but also its advanced features. You can create your changelog or newsfeed in seconds. It includes many options to customize the updates page along with its widget.

For teams, you can invite collaborators with dedicated rights.

Publications support Markdown, images and videos. You can schedule them in the future.

In case you need to create your own view, a great API is available.

The integration with Zapier is also really complete.