Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2013 edition

news.ycombinator.com

91–100 of 169 posts

Re: Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2013 edition

#91

I STRONGLY recommend Asana: http://www.asana.com It's like using a smart piece of paper that just gets out of your way and let's you create, assign, toggle, set dates, etc really intuitively. I'm a freelancer - and for my usage I typically have a Workspace called Freelance Projects. In that workspace I have many projects, each for each freelance gig I land. I then invite my client (YOU CAN INVITE UP TO 30 PEOPLE PER…

Very interesting. How is it pronounced? Asana like in Yoga?

Yep

Re: Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2013 edition

#94
post #35
post #14

Moqups ( https://www.moqups.com/ ) - Wireframing tool Sendgrid ( http://sendgrid.com/ ) - Sending emails Braintree ( https://www.braintreepayments.com/ ) - Payments Deployd ( http://www.deployd.com/ ) - Quickly design and build APIs Github ( https://github.com/ ) - Project hosting and issue tracker

Oh my god, Deployd is incredible! How come it's not in the front HN page forever? Seriously now, this is pratically open source Parse!

I agree -- wow! Seems like it also competes with firebase. And it seems like it would also be useful in some cases where you'd otherwise use meteor or derby.

Re: Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2013 edition

#95

I've been assembling a list of these lately for a book that I'm working on. ( http://startingandsustaining.com ) Some of the categories are fairly loose as some apps don't fit nicely into categorical buckets, but hopefully this is a helpful list. --Browser/Email Testing BrowserStack ( http://www.browserstack.com ) Litmus ( http://litmus.com ) --Bug/Issue Tracking BugHerd ( http://bugherd.com ) Lighthouse ( http://lig…

Awesome, great to see Instrumental ( https://instrumentalapp.com/ ) in your list. I'm one of the folks working on it, would love to hear your thoughts on us. Some quick reviews of some of the products listed: * Lighthouse ( http://lighthouseapp.com ) - Bug Tracker - good for keeping track of simple stuff last I used it (~2 years ago), but Github Issues obviated its use for me. * Pivotal ( http://www.pivotaltracker.co…

Did I understand things correctly? Instrumental appears to be Ruby only...

Re: Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2013 edition

#96
Because you specifically are asking about "services", this is may be slightly off-topic, but I'd be interested in seeing a thread about open-source alternatives as well. When we were first starting out, we used a lot of these services and they were absolutely instrumental to get us going, allowing us to focus on what mattered at the time.

But the more we developed our rhythm and workflow, the more we started constantly running up against small idiosyncrasies with each service that we were powerless to fix (we always submitted feedback, sometimes they'd implement our idea, sometimes they wouldn't). Maybe this app had an awesome interface, but their status labels were odd given the usual workflow. Maybe this other app was perfect in every way but had no API to allow us to tie it into the rest of our process.

Anyway, we started switching from services to open-source products, which really allowed us to take our process to the next level and optimize everything specifically for our flow.

For example (italics are open-source):

---------------------

Project Management:

Email => Basecamp => Pivotal => Redmine (and tried Asana but went back to Redmine)

---------------------

Issue Tracking:

Email => Github Issues => Redmine

---------------------

Continuous Integration:

CruiseControl => Integrity => TDDium (https://www.tddium.com) / Semaphore (https://semaphoreapp.com)

---------------------

Error/Exception Tracking:

ExceptionNotifier => Airbrake => Errbit

---------------------

Time Tracking & Invoicing:

Harvest => Cashboard (http://www.cashboardapp.com)

---------------------

Group Chat:

Campfire => [currently looking into] Kandan

---------------------

Code Collaboration:

Self-hosted SVN => Unfuddle => Github

---------------------

Design Collaboration:

Pixelapse => ConceptShare

---------------------

You'll notice the only non-open-source services we still use are Github, Cashboard, TDDium/Semaphore, and ConceptShare. For the open-source services, we're able to host most of them on Heroku and rarely ever have to worry about maintaining them, other than security patches and whatnot. And we've been able to do some pretty cool things internally as far as connecting the different apps, since we have control over the APIs and underlying code, allowing us to add and change as needed.

You'll also notice that for CI, we actually went in the opposite direction from open-source to service-based. I have an entire writeup (not yet published) on why I actually found CI to work best for us as a 3rd-party service.

Re: Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2013 edition

#97

I've been assembling a list of these lately for a book that I'm working on. ( http://startingandsustaining.com ) Some of the categories are fairly loose as some apps don't fit nicely into categorical buckets, but hopefully this is a helpful list. --Browser/Email Testing BrowserStack ( http://www.browserstack.com ) Litmus ( http://litmus.com ) --Bug/Issue Tracking BugHerd ( http://bugherd.com ) Lighthouse ( http://lig…

Awesome, great to see Instrumental ( https://instrumentalapp.com/ ) in your list. I'm one of the folks working on it, would love to hear your thoughts on us. Some quick reviews of some of the products listed: * Lighthouse ( http://lighthouseapp.com ) - Bug Tracker - good for keeping track of simple stuff last I used it (~2 years ago), but Github Issues obviated its use for me. * Pivotal ( http://www.pivotaltracker.co…

Pivotal: Horrible, abysmal tool. Hate it with a passion. No clear overview at all, UI is full of shiny colors but is messy as hell. I'm really glad we've switched to Jira[1] after fighting with pivotal for a couple of months. YMMV ofcourse :)

[1] http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/overview

Re: Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2013 edition

#98

I've been assembling a list of these lately for a book that I'm working on. ( http://startingandsustaining.com ) Some of the categories are fairly loose as some apps don't fit nicely into categorical buckets, but hopefully this is a helpful list. --Browser/Email Testing BrowserStack ( http://www.browserstack.com ) Litmus ( http://litmus.com ) --Bug/Issue Tracking BugHerd ( http://bugherd.com ) Lighthouse ( http://lig…

You're missing a pretty important category tools used to communicate automatically with users. Mixpanel and KISS have some features like this, but there's others more focused on it. Customer.io, Intercom.io, etc.

Thanks for mentioning it. Intercom is in there, kind of crammed into the "support" category. I'll definitely add Customer.io and create a dedicated category.

Ultimately, this wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list. It's just a quick list from some very superficial collecting of URLs. There's still a lot of work to do for the book before the list is complete.

Re: Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2013 edition

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome, great to see Instrumental ( https://instrumentalapp.com/ ) in your list. I'm one of the folks working on it, would love to hear your thoughts on us. Some quick reviews of some of the products listed: * Lighthouse ( http://lighthouseapp.com ) - Bug Tracker - good for keeping track of simple stuff last I used it (~2 years ago), but Github Issues obviated its use for me. * Pivotal ( http://www.pivotaltracker.co…

Did I understand things correctly? Instrumental appears to be Ruby only...

Our agent (for in process collection) is Ruby only right now. That said, we've got a large number of customers who really like our graphs and query language, and so send us metrics using a Statsd backend[1] written by one of our other customers. (edit: which is to say that we really support anything that has a Statsd client)

[1]: https://github.com/collectiveidea/statsd-instrumental-backen...

Re: Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2013 edition

#100
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome, great to see Instrumental ( https://instrumentalapp.com/ ) in your list. I'm one of the folks working on it, would love to hear your thoughts on us. Some quick reviews of some of the products listed: * Lighthouse ( http://lighthouseapp.com ) - Bug Tracker - good for keeping track of simple stuff last I used it (~2 years ago), but Github Issues obviated its use for me. * Pivotal ( http://www.pivotaltracker.co…

Pivotal: Horrible, abysmal tool. Hate it with a passion. No clear overview at all, UI is full of shiny colors but is messy as hell. I'm really glad we've switched to Jira[1] after fighting with pivotal for a couple of months. YMMV ofcourse :) [1] http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/overview

I definitely agree with the YMMV bit; I have found this category of tools to be incredibly divisive. I know a lot of folks who thought that going in the opposite direction of yours, Jira to Pivotal, was one of the best decisions they've made for a project.

I've only ever casually used Jira, however, so am ill qualified to speak to its strengths.

Post reply on HN