For reasons I won't get into the lead developer (and a few non devs) at my employer abruptly left the company that now includes 4 full time developers, and one dev ops person (who just joined recently).
For many years the lead developer worked both cooperatively, and semi isolated from the development team pushing out code, altering database schema, and so on. Much of the knowledge of how the system works, both day to day operational processes, technical documentation, and so on are a mystery.
We're now faced with learning / investigating / putting out fires on the fly and we've all agreed we need to document everything as we go and start now. My first thought when it came to documentation was a wiki like Wikipedia. Nice big pages where content is king, easy to link page to page, and edit.
As I've looked around I've found all sorts of "wiki" like documentation options but I'm both overwhelmed at the variety of options, and a little annoyed that they all look the same.
What I'm looking for:
- Speed and ease of use. I documenting things to be easy and as low friction as possible.
- I've seen some self hosted options, but in this case I'd like this hosted outside our hybrid cloud setup. We're concerned about the stability of our platform at the moment and need access to this documentation when that platform is having problems.
- Security is obviously important as we're going to be documenting some sensitive material. Everything from network diagrams, logical data flow diagrams, client documentation and so on.
I tried out Notion, silite, and looked through similar options inside services we already subscribe to, and while I don't think they have any deal breakers with what I've tried they're all kinda the same.... and I dislike how every time I make a new page you get this modal style pop up to edit that seems smaller than the page it was on, that's not a deal breaker but for situations where the page will have wider content it is a little annoying / doesn't feel very documentation content focused.
I'm wondering, if you were in our spot and you were starting some collaborative documentation on an established system from nearly 0, what would you pick?