Inspirations and ideas

Our team is in everlasting need of a solution for documenting what we do, how we do it, and why we do what we do. We tried a lot of solutions, even built some of our own. Finally, we believe we nailed it. We followed a set of principles:

• It has to work with Slack
• Content must be organized in the most intuitive way
• Content must be instantly searchable and search results must be relevant
• Markdown syntax [whichever] wins every time

We started to build on top of this four principles, read some more stuff and came up with our technology stack.

What it does

Sliki is a simple wikilike tool that can be searched and edited from Slack or within the app itself.

Tech solution

Our tagline is “We don’t need no database server“. This means that our Wiki software:

• Reads and writes Markdown files from and to the system.
• All the changes to the content are are tracked and backed up with Git.
• Search for tags or keywords is done with Zend’s Lucene search engine written entirely in PHP.

If we ever decide to migrate our content to any other server, we’ll simply clone our Git repo somewhere else. That’s all it takes!

Because our product needs to integrate with Slack, we are using Slash Commands to enable users to search or to add a new entry into wiki.

Markdown/Slack/No Database/Zend_Search_Lucene FTW!

Challenges that we faced

Basically, greatest challenge that our team had to face is to try to get rid of database as a primary storage mentality  that is web developer’s default solution for every problem.But, that’s the story for a very long blog post.

What we're proud of

We are proud of success rate of 95% for sprints on this project. Not bad.

What we've learned so far

We’ve learned a lot about Symfony/Angular projects in itself. We even had a mentor’s lecture at the second week of the project to help us bootstrap everything:

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