50 Ideas You Really Need To Know

On the Document That Keeps Growing

The file has been sitting on my desktop for about seven years. It started as a Google Doc shared between three engineers who were tired of answering the same questions. It is now 47,382 words and still growing. People refer to it by its working title — 50 Ideas You Really Need To Know — because at some point around idea number 38 we stopped adding new ones and just started reorganizing what was already there. I have watched this document save people dozens of hours and cost me probably eighty. The value comes from the editing process, not the final product. What follows is a practical guide to building something similar and why most people stop halfway through.

50 Ideas You Really Need To Know

This is the heading under which everything lives. I will not reproduce all 50 here. That would take two thousand words and the point is lost. Instead I will walk through how to build the thing, what I learned from actually maintaining it, and where the whole approach breaks down. The structure is deliberately unglamorous. Each entry follows the same pattern: a one-sentence thesis, a paragraph explaining the mechanism, a short note on when it fails, and a link to the original source if one exists. No sub-bullets. No nested definitions. The constraint is the whole point. I tried expanding entries into proper tutorials early on. The document bloated from 15,000 words to 68,000 in three months and nobody read it anymore. The compression ratio matters more than the depth. A single sharp paragraph does more work than three well-researched ones that get skimmed and abandoned.

Idea 1: Most Knowledge Is Already Written Down, Just Poorly Indexed

The biggest cost in any technical field is not discovering new information. It is finding the right existing information when you need it. I spent six weeks in 2019 trying to track down why a particular API pagination endpoint returned inconsistent page counts across regions. The answer was in a 2016 internal RFC that had been marked superseded but never actually replaced. A properly indexed knowledge base would have surfaced this in minutes. The problem was not that the information did not exist. I learned this the hard way. We deprecated a data migration script in Q3 2020. Nobody documented why. In Q1 2021 a junior engineer rewrote it from scratch because the original logic was buried in a Jira ticket from a different team. The rewrite introduced a subtle race condition that took three days to diagnose. We now version every decision, every deprecation, and every workaround. Even when the reason seems obvious at the time, it will not be obvious eighteen months later. This sounds simple and almost nobody follows it. The person building something always knows the context. The person maintaining it does not. I have rewritten my own code from two years ago and spent an hour reconstructing decisions I made on a Tuesday afternoon that I had no record of. Documentation is an act of empathy for your future self, which is a stranger.

Some of the most useful entries in the document are things that initially read like bad advice. Less monitoring can mean better reliability because alert fatigue causes real incidents to be ignored. Simpler APIs generate more adoption than comprehensive ones because adoption is a friction problem, not a feature problem. These are not paradoxes. They are observations about human behavior that standard training manuals rarely capture. A document with 200 excellent entries that nobody can navigate is worthless. A document with 80 decent entries that people can find in under ten seconds is valuable. I restructured the entire document twice in four years. The first time I organized by topic area. The second time I organized by problem type. The second version doubled readership within three months without adding a single new entry. There is no single correct process. What works for a team of five is different from what works for an individual. I will describe the process that has survived the longest in my experience.

Ideas come from three sources: direct experience, secondhand reports that turn out to be true, and readings where you realize you have been doing something wrong for months. The raw material is messy. Do not try to clean it immediately. Dump it into a holding folder first. I use a simple markdown file with one entry per section. The goal is volume, not quality, during this phase. After two weeks of accumulation, I sort through everything. The filter is simple: does this idea change how someone would act if they understood it? If the answer is no, it goes. Most first drafts do not survive this pass. That is normal. I usually keep about a third of what I collect. Each surviving idea gets one paragraph. No more. The paragraph must answer three questions: what is the idea, why does it matter, and what happens when you ignore it. If you cannot answer all three concisely, the idea is not sharp enough yet. Rewrite it or cut it.

This is where most people fail. A static document dies. I schedule a quarterly review where I read every entry and update it if the underlying reality has shifted. Some ideas become obsolete. New ones emerge. The document should grow at roughly the same rate that old entries are revised or removed. Net growth should be slow and deliberate. Here are the specific failures I encountered while building and maintaining this kind of system. I list them because they are the ones that cost me the most time. Punctuation of acronyms kills searchability. I wrote an entry explaining why you should avoid creating new acronyms in documentation. Within six months, three other entries referenced it using variations like API, api, and Application Programming Interface. Search returns fragmented. I now use a canonical form and link every variation to it.

Over-indexing by tool is a trap. We migrated from Google Docs to Notion to Obsidian over four years. Each migration took approximately three weeks of work and produced zero improvement in actual usage. The tool is secondary. The discipline of periodic review is primary. I recommend picking the simplest tool that supports your workflow and staying with it. Sharing widely too early destroys the document. We published an early version to the wider company in 2020. Response was positive but the feedback volume was unmanageable. Every suggestion felt valid in isolation. We spent six weeks triaging suggestions that would have taken twenty minutes to address if we had waited until the document was further along. Build in private. Share when it is ready, not when it is good enough.

Where This Approach Fails

I should be honest about the limitations. This method does not work for everything. Highly specialized technical content requires more than a paragraph. A 500-word entry on database indexing strategies is inadequate. The compression that makes general knowledge portable destroys nuance in technical domains. Use this approach for principles, not procedures. Procedures belong in separate documentation. Mixing them creates documents that are too shallow for specialists and too dense for generalists. Team ownership creates bureaucratic drag. When more than three people contribute regularly, consensus replaces clarity. We hit this wall in 2022. Five engineers all had opinions on how a particular entry should be phrased. The discussion lasted two weeks. The final wording satisfied nobody. I now enforce a single maintainer model. Contributors can submit ideas. The maintainer decides how they are written. This is not democratic and that is the point.

Stale ideas are worse than no ideas. An outdated entry that someone follows is actively harmful. We had a three-year-old recommendation about caching strategies that became wrong when our provider changed their cache invalidation model. Nobody updated it. Two engineers followed it and spent a day debugging the resulting inconsistency. Establish a sunset clause. Any entry older than two years that has not been reviewed automatically gets flagged.

Practical Details

The formatting I use is deliberately minimal. Plain text with markdown headers. No images. No embedded videos. The reason is durability. A markdown file opens everywhere. It survives format migrations. It can be version-controlled without binary conflicts. I store it in a git repository with a commit for each meaningful change. This gives me a complete history of every edit and the ability to revert mistakes. The file lives on a private repository. Public sharing is optional and I recommend waiting until you have at least thirty entries before considering it. Thirty is the number where the document starts to feel like a resource rather than a draft.

The Download

I do not host a public download link for the full document. The version that exists is tied to specific organizational contexts and sharing it without that context does more harm than good. What I can offer is the template. It is a single markdown file with the structure described above and five sample entries that demonstrate the format. You can find it by searching for the repository name associated with this document. It is publicly available under an MIT license. The template is the part that matters. The sample entries show the compression level I recommend. Use them as a reference, not a model to copy verbatim.

Template Structure

Each entry follows this exact format: Idea [number]: [title] [One paragraph. Maximum 150 words. Must include: the core claim, the mechanism, and the failure mode.]

Source: [link or "internal"] Updated: [date or "never"] Review status: [current | due | overdue]

The review status field is the most important part of the template. It creates accountability. An entry marked overdue is an entry that may be wrong. Overdue entries should be addressed before new ones are added.

Starting Today

If you want to build something like this, start with five ideas. Not fifty. Five. Write them using the template. Share them with two people who will give you honest feedback. If the feedback is useful, expand to ten. If it is not, reconsider whether the format is the problem or the content is the problem. The document that has survived longest in my experience is not the one with the most ideas. It is the one where the maintainer had the discipline to cut entries that had lost relevance. Death is part of the process. A living knowledge base must be allowed to shrink as well as grow. I have maintained this particular collection for seven years. It has probably saved my team hundreds of hours. It has also cost me significant time that I would rather have spent elsewhere. The return is real but it is not linear. The first twenty entries took more effort than the next eighty combined. After that point, the marginal cost of each new entry drops because the structure is already in place.

If you are looking for a shortcut, this is not it. If you are looking for something that actually improves how your team handles knowledge over time, it is one of the few things I know that does.