katsukare-

For functional sturdy furniture like this, if you are OK with the look, you can make the base/frame from aluminium 80/20 extrusions (the kind with t-slots and all kinds of standard brackets etc for fastening them together). Misumi has a simple CAD interface to design a complete unit, and this generates a single part number for you to purchase everything cut to length, with holes if needed, and all required accessories and fasteners to assemble it. You can easily add a wooden countertop or shelves if desired.

It's not very cheap but it's infinitely configurable (unlike Ikea hacks) and doesn't require much skill (unlike building from wood at least if you want it to look OK).

In Europe a CNC, or at least good and repeatable saw is available at large hardware stores. You can get any product cut to any shape precisely as long as it's a rectangle. I've not noticed one that offers more than this such as drilling holes.

But even if you were to get the wood cut and prepared perfectly, there's still a lot of skill to turn that into nice desk for example, with good joinery, veneer on exposed end grain, etc and a lot that can go wrong, and you are likely to end up with a worse result than a mass produced desk for a much higher price. This type of manufacturing can't compete at all with the cost optimizations that Ikea can do. So where you see B2C in this space is built-in furniture like for kitchens. This has a limited design space so a lot of the parts are standardized, and the design can be constrained to not have the end user work on details like exposed end grain. I guess this doesn't really have an alternative mass-produced option, so the price comparison is to hiring a contractor, so it makes sense as an offering.

But it's evidently hard to get right. If you go to an Ikea that sells returned goods, that section is filled with kitchen countertops cut to the wrong length (good source of cheap wood for projects by the way).

People like to complain about it not being solid wood but the furniture from Ikea, such as Lack and Kallax is fit for purpose and remains a low price despite the cost of wood going up a lot. And what you can get at a similar price point from Wal-Mart in North America, or Conforama in Europe, is much much worse quality. Especially the veneer which holds up from Ikea but is more like wallpaper if you spend the same price somewhere else.

Thanks for this, I’ll consider the roles of contributors including updating tickets, rather than trying to force it with required fields.

I wanted to add a comment specifically about documentation tools. We've always had a lot of collaboration. On an earlier project (let's call it project 0), at the same company, back when there was only a few people, we did all documentation in latex with CVS. It was glorious but as soon as a couple of non-technical people joined it was unmanageable and inevitably someone would have to troubleshoot others' environments, usually eventually giving up and manually merging on another's behalf.

Then we switched to google drive plus latex/CVS. It was not so glorious using both at the same time for the same files. We quickly switched to google docs only, which I came to love for realtime collaboration (a game changer for remote meetings) and its commenting system. It seems very hard to break linked content, like drawings or spreadsheet cells in a document. Keeping your architecture diagrams in a presentation file and linking them to all of your documents is also a game changer (they will automatically update).

Google drive also became much better when TeamDrive was added. I like that by design its permissions are not complicated and hierarchical. It's not possible to deny permissions to a subfolder in a TeamDrive. But old school IT people think this is a requirement.

Besides Confluence, I tried Amazon WorkDocs (useless), Office's new collaboration tools (broken) and Office 365 online (not bad but I predict people will just download and work offline meaning 2+ versions in 2+ places).

I'm going to keep using google docs while I can but have Confluence ready for whenever strict onsite requirements are enforced. Hopefully someday google docs has an enterprise or more security options. So far there are only options for HIPAA, and not other industry-specific options.