[jkachmar]

So this was something that a former boss/colleague and I kinda worked on for a few months at a prior company to help architects collaborate on global development standards.

There was a base set of standards which evolved over time, and regions whose standards would extend that base in different ways.

We actually got to the point where a small team of architects would write these standards in Markdown, use GitHub Desktop to manage their branching/PR-ing/reviewing workflows, and then tag releases. Then Jenkins would pick up the tag and process the Markdown with Pandoc to produce DOCX and PDF documents that adhered to our corporate style guide.

IIRC there were a few reasons why it never got widespread adoption. One thing that sticks is that even after we taught people how to use git and they ran with it while pushing out updates, without the daily reinforcement (e.g. like what software workflows require) the knowledge just didn't seem to stick.

The whole thing was really slick; in retrospect I wish we would have given a small talk about it and open sourced the workflow as an example. If nothing else, it reinforced my belief that with _just a little more polish_ force-multiplying dev tools could save people in other industries a lot of time/effort.