Describe how the tools in your stack fit together to help other developers learn from your experience
Today we’re really excited to announce a brand new feature called Stack Decisions - an easy way for you to share why you chose the tools in your stack and get visibility in front of a growing community of over 250K fellow developers. We’re launching this in partnership with some of the most loved tools on StackShare, including Microsoft .NET, DigitalOcean, Postman, Codecov, Auth0, Algolia, Kong, Sentry, Zulip, and a handful more.
The world of software development has moved far beyond code collaboration. The modern stack has more 3rd party tools in it than ever before, and therefore more decision points. Which building blocks you choose to use, whether open source or SaaS, is becoming a bigger part of the software development process. Yet, there isn’t a standard process through which to share this part of the dev lifecycle and see how others arrived at a given technology decision.
The feedback from our community has been that StackShare is great for finding out who is using which technology - but more often than not, the real question is why did they choose that technology and how are they using it? Knowing this helps you decide if it’s really right for you vs. pulling the trigger just because you see it in someone else’s stack.
Given its growing importance, we then asked the question- what if sharing technology decisions were as commonplace as writing an organized and thorough README.md to describe a code repository? We realized that by making this easier, we could not only help to increase the net amount of knowledge about technology accessible to all developers, but in turn help make you more productive at work. And so Stack Decisions were born.
How Stack Decisions work
You can now come to StackShare and write a paragraph or two about the problem you faced, tag the tools you decided to use to solve the problem, hit the post button and the entire StackShare community can discover what you wrote instantly through their Feed, while any developer across the world can discover your Decisions via external search engine when they need to make a similar decision.
Contributing Stack 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.
With more Decisions contributions, your community reputation will increase. Over time, you’ll have a repository of knowledge that you’ve contributed that you can point to (similar to a public GitHub profile), which you can use to give others insights into how you make technology decisions. This matters because today the reality is that the code you choose not to write is often times just as important as the code you do write.
Capturing a technology decision shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, but it could save the right reader hours, days, or even weeks.
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Stack Decisions are typically longer than a tweet, but much shorter than a Medium post.
Stack Decisions in the wild
Some awesome dev tool makers share our hope that this is going to help developers make better technology decisions in a big way and have encouraged their own communities to jump in and start sharing. As a result, there's already a lot of Decisions out there- you can check them out here in the Feed.
The future of sharing technology decisions
We hope you’re as excited as we are about a future where sharing and discussing technology decisions is considered a best practice.
We encourage you to think of a technology decision you made whether on a personal project or at your company, and tell the community about it.
“The best time to share a Stack Decision was yesterday. The next best time is right now.” - Unknown
Share your first decision and tweet at us with the hashtag #techdecision. Check out some of the Decisions we made while building Decisions here.
With the introduction of Stack Decisions, we’re taking a huge step forward towards our ultimate vision of transforming the way that all OSS and SaaS tools are adopted- by helping to highlight the key technology decisions being made by developers across the world.
Stay tuned for more exciting Decisions-related announcements coming soon, including their deep integration into all the profile types across StackShare.
We’d love to hear your feedback - reach us anytime at hello@stackshare.io
Happy Stacking!
- Yonas & the entire team @ StackShare
P.S. We’re hiring!