- Authors would change a spec after I started writing code
- It's hard to find what proposals would benefit from my review
- It's hard to find the right person to review my proposals
- It's not always obvious if a proposal has reached consensus (e.g. buried comments)
- I'm not notified if a proposal I approved is now ready to be worked on
And that's just scratching the surface. The most popular solutions (like Notion or Google Drive + Docs) mostly lack semantics. For example it's easy as a human to see a table in a document with rows representing reviewers and a checkbox representing review acceptance but it's hard to formally extract meaning and prevent a document from "being published" when criteria isn't met.
RFC Hub aims to solve these issues by building an easy to use interface around all the metadata associated with technical proposals instead of containing it textually within the document itself.
The project is still under heavy development as I work on it most nights and weekends. The next big feature I'm planning is proposal templates and the ability to refer to documents as something other than RFCs (Request for Comments). E.g. a company might have a UIRFC for GUI work (User Interface RFCs), a DBADR (Database Architecture Decision Record), etc. And while there's a built-in notification system I'm still working on a Slack integration. Auth works by sending tokens via email but of course RFC Hub needs Google auth.
Please let me know what you think!
samuelstros•2mo ago
GDocs might be annoying to track who read the RFC etc. etc. but everyone is familiar with it.
I write RFCs, I share RFCs and your tool seems to require a substantial amount of buy in
- register
- unclear what the writing experience is
- outdated / overloaded UI
The last RFC I wrote was in hackmd (https://hackmd.io/Jjy-afCWS4CAFlHa62anMQ) because
- I wanted Markdown to store the RFC in git eventually
- Google Docs has issues with Markdown rouundtrips
- I didn't want to use git to write with VSCode (although... I actually did. I let CLaude Code write most of the RFC under my guidance, then put it into hackmd for easy sharing)
I hope the feedback helps!
tlhunter•2mo ago
I agree that the UI is dated and can be a little overwhelming. The sample RFC (https://rfchub.app/rfchub/rfc1-org-batch-markdown-exporter-j...) shows what a proposal looks like with every single feature being used. Most of the time they'll look a bit simpler. I have a big UI overhaul planned but I'm hoping to get more real usage feedback on the core functionality first.
FWIW the editing process does use markdown, and the "download" link in the sidebar downloads a markdown file with YAML frontmatter to avoid vendor lock-in. RFC Hub has so much functionality that it's difficult to explain it all on the homepage. There is this overview document but it's honestly just overwhelming:
https://rfchub.app/blog/an-overview-of-rfc-hub
samuelstros•2mo ago
That's what I meant with overwhelming / too niche.
It seems like you intend to productize the RFC process e2e. But most "time consuming" parts of an RFC process is the human stuff "Did you read this?" "Did you update the RFC again?" etc. That back-and-forth seems to be expressed by all the features you have in RFC Hub but:
1. That makes RFC hub complicated.
2. Requires buy-in from every party to participate in all of RFC hubs feature like "Yes, I reviewed it and pressed the reviewed button in RFC Hub"
1 & 2 combined make RFC Hub (likely) a very niche product. New users are overwhelmed. Existing users need to onboard new users (their collegues) though. Otherwise, the RFC process will fallback to just DMs on Slack. Only a few teams will have sufficient buy in from all team members.
tlhunter•2mo ago
I've worked at a few companies with thousands of engineers and where I've had to review hundreds of proposals. That's where the product really shines. Of course I do want it to be useful to smaller orgs as well. Adding Google auth should help reduce signup friction.
As another person on here put it, RFC Hub will benefit from automated importing of proposals. To be maximally beneficial all engineers at a company need to have an account and all RFCs need to be in RFC Hub. It almost requires a top down mandate which is bad. I do hope to make it incrementally beneficial for smaller teams.