I've used several tools over the years but no one fits my needs well enough. I wonder if I miss some magic tool. Which tool work best for a single person operation?
Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage your freelance projects?
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Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage your freelance projects?
#2The only tool I truly find magically despite how boring it sounds is chatGPT, I can tell it everything as a living dev log, I tell it time date when I do things and why and so on just documentating my progress, listing todos and reminders as I go but now I can "talk" back forth on the administrative things like reminding me where I was, recap here, it's just great for managing boring things like I never been able to do before
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage your freelance projects?
#3Trello is good for the kanban side of things.
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage your freelance projects?
#4The only tool I truly find magically despite how boring it sounds is chatGPT, I can tell it everything as a living dev log, I tell it time date when I do things and why and so on just documentating my progress, listing todos and reminders as I go but now I can "talk" back forth on the administrative things like reminding me where I was, recap here, it's just great for managing boring things like I never been able to…
Does ChatGPT have storage options now? Seems like you would need that unless you paste the output into a doc and reupload it.
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage your freelance projects?
#5What are your needs?
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage your freelance projects?
#6 makeRe: Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage your freelance projects?
#7The free tiers of https://linear.app/ and https://www.notion.so/ are pretty good.
Combined with plugging your linear account into the VCS of your choice (probably github/gitlab/bitbucket).
The free tier of https://www.figma.com/ is good for mockups and design.
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage your freelance projects?
#8Todoist, Obsidian and Eagle form the second brain. Write to forget things, not remember them. Only plan daily if you can. Github issues + projects, even without a team helps to track progress and prioritise tasks. Mix Clockify in there as a time tracker and invoice generator for short and long term tasks
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage your freelance projects?
#9Git for source code control. A notepad and pencil for listing out the TODOs. I write "Done" next to a bullet point when it's done. I might rewrite the list occasionally without the done items for clarity or write numbers next to the bullet points to prioritise them. I think if you can't write out a task description as a short sentence then it's either not well understood enough or too broad in scope to accomplish easily. In the latter case it needs breaking out into a set of smaller tasks.
I don't use any framework for unit tests. Only a short program for each test that returns 0 on success or some other number for failure and prints a message to stderr about what the problem is. These get run in a loop from a shell script.
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage your freelance projects?
#10make
Yeah make is nice for managing simple build steps.