Why Your Engineering Wiki is a Graveyard (And How to Fix It)

Source: Dev.to

You know the feeling. You open a file, stare at a block of spaghetti code, and wonder: “Why on earth did we build it this way?”
You check the wiki. The last update was three years ago by someone who left the company in 2024. You check Slack. The decision is buried in a thread from six months ago that you can’t find because you don’t remember the exact keywords.

This is the Knowledge Graveyard, and it’s killing your team’s velocity. As developers, we want to write code, not history books. When knowledge walks out the door—or gets lost in the noise—we spend ~30 % of our time re‑explaining old decisions or scrambling to onboard new hires.

Below is an overview of tools that aim to solve this problem, starting with the one we built because we were tired of the chaos.

Syncally.app

Best for: Teams who want to automate context, not just write docs.

Full disclosure: I’m building this because I was the “Overwhelmed CTO” tired of explaining the same architecture decisions every week.

The Philosophy

Most tools treat documentation as a separate task. You write code in one place, and you write about the code in another. Syncally flips this by creating a Unified Workspace where your tasks, meetings, code, and calendar live together.

Key Features

• Automatic Context Linking – Links code commits directly to the discussions and meetings where the decisions were made.
• Onboarding Mode – New engineers can ask, “Why is auth built this way?” and get an answer pointing to the exact PR and the Zoom meeting recording where it was decided.
• Knowledge Graph – A visual map that shows how projects, people, and decisions connect, so you can see the blast radius of a change before you make it.

Why It Works

It solves the “tool fatigue” of switching between Jira, Notion, Slack, and Zoom. It captures the why, not just the what.

Glean

Best for: Large enterprises needing powerful internal search.

If your company is massive (think 1,000+ employees) and you already have data scattered across hundreds of SaaS apps, Glean is a strong contender. It acts as a search layer on top of your existing chaos.

The Good

• Universal Search – Indexes everything (Drive, Slack, Jira, GitHub) and lets you search across them from one bar.
• Permissions – Respects existing permission structures, so people don’t see what they shouldn’t.

The Trade‑off

Glean is excellent at finding the document, but it doesn’t necessarily connect the context. If you have a bad document in Google Drive, Glean will find that bad document very quickly. It helps you find the needle, but it doesn’t organize the haystack.

Stack Overflow for Teams

Best for: Q&A and capturing specific technical solutions.

The “Teams” version brings the familiar Stack Overflow Q&A format inside your firewall.

The Good

• Familiarity – Every dev knows how to use it.
• Gamification – Upvotes and accepted answers encourage participation.
• Specifics – Great for “How do I run the build script?”‑type questions.

The Trade‑off

It relies entirely on manual input. Someone has to ask the question, and someone has to answer it. It doesn’t capture the passive knowledge generated in meetings or code reviews. If nobody writes it down, it doesn’t exist.

Notion

Best for: Flexible, design‑heavy documentation.

Notion is beautiful and flexible; you can build amazing roadmaps and wikis with it.

The Good

• Flexibility – Structure it however you want.
• Collaboration – Real‑time editing is smooth.

The Trade‑off

It is the definition of the “Graveyard” risk. Because it’s so flexible, it requires constant gardening. Without a dedicated technical writer or a very disciplined culture, Notion pages will rot. It’s a blank canvas—which is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

Conclusion