Surprised not to see ClickUp here. I use it to manage my personal life as well
Ask HN: Solo devs, how do you plan your development?
181–190 of 190 posts
Re: Ask HN: Solo devs, how do you plan your development?
#182I'm wondering if there is a graph based note taking tool out there?
Re: Ask HN: Solo devs, how do you plan your development?
#183Kinda depends on how large your product / project is. I work as a (mostly) solo dev on very large projects that are typically completed by teams of 5-10 and take 6-12 months to complete (even for a those teams). * Pivotal Tracker is IMO the best agile PM system. * I break each project into Epics, then down into discrete Stories, basic agile stuff. * I only score stories at 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. Anything larger MUST be b…
> I absolutely do not open an IDE until this process is done How do you deal with changing requirements? Or when your understanding of the problem changes midway into the project? I find that one or the other happens frequently. It's nobody's fault (most of the time), just the result of the reality that customers don't always know what they want and are frequently unable to accurately communicate what they want.
Oh that happens all the time, sure. I'm referencing what I do at the start of a project.
Re: Ask HN: Solo devs, how do you plan your development?
#184Personal Kanban: http://personalkanban.com/pk/personal-kanban-101/ Try the book. After the book, you’ll be better equipped to scale from 2 or 3 devs to 20 or 30 devs while remaining low overhead, because you’ll understand the essence of iterative and collaborative development versus what’s been watered down and ceremonialized into Agile/SCRUM.
Thank you! Finished the book already since reading your comment. Very simple, and encourages (and shows examples of) personalized variants, experimentation with the system etc. I like it. Gonna start today.
I've been just deleting things from TO DO lists when done.. which isn't very satisfying!
Re: Ask HN: Solo devs, how do you plan your development?
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use a todo.diff - so the text editor color codes my lines started with `+` and `-`
Similarly, I use todo.md, and have VIM highlight "[ ]", "[x]", "[>]", "[v]", and "[-]" for bullet-journal-like TODO, DONE, Deferred, Dropped, and FAILED, respectively.
(too late to edit)
Like this: https://github.com/jodavaho/bashlog
Re: Ask HN: Solo devs, how do you plan your development?
#186Over the years I have compiled a log of project metadata. Nowadays I use it to forecast and plan each project task.
The key part is having the task to time forecast for your overall environment (people, company culture, country, …) .
Every project starts with a drilldown of requirements to tasks (just name and description), the more detailed the better. For each task I add a subjective complexity. The mapping of complexity to actual time is based on previous projects metadata.
I try to add a task for each time-consuming effort, documentation, HW procurement, HW shipping, cabling, development, validation, acceptance tests, baby-sitting, billing.
The metadata is a living document, it adds more rows as the project progress.
For tracking the metadata, I use a Google Sheet for each project as a tracking project management. TODO file in steroids. There are two levels, one for the task and another for steps in the tasks.
Each of the rows have more or less following information.
* id, name and description
* status
* owner
* area
* initial perceived complexity.
* final perceived complexity
* external perceived pressure
* dependencies
* total involved people
* initial estimated time
* dev starting time
* ending dev time
* real development time
* testing starting time
* test ending time
Once the initial per task forecast is done, I have also try to put the high level tasks and its dependencies in a classic Gantt waterfall (using projectlibre). The Gantt gives an initial idea of the time, but it has never been fully accurate, because as project evolves, there are always new and unexpected tasks.
Note that the pressure column in the list above, is one of the principal inputs to forecast, due to Parkinson's law.
Re: Ask HN: Solo devs, how do you plan your development?
#187Instead of Trello you can use Github's Projects. It has kanban boards like Trello and it can create progress bars based off of each of your tasks. They also support various automation features based off actions with your branches to move cards around.
I use Restyaboard, an alternative to Trello, that has the same Kanban features, as well as other views such as a to-do list and mind map. I love the visual aspect of the boards and being able to make lists for each topic is nice.
Re: Ask HN: Solo devs, how do you plan your development?
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using Clubhouse for a new solo project as well. I love it. It's so much faster than Jira. It's refreshing using something that loads so fast and has a UI that is nice to look at.
I migrated from Trello to Clubhouse because I really needed support for blockers and dependencies, but Trello doesn't have a good way to do that without paying for certain integrations. I still use Trello for my non-project work, though.
I too migrated from Trello to Restyaboard. Restyaboard is a brilliant free tool and I've been experiencing it among other tools and it has some great features and ideas there! Restyaboard is an excellent free Trello alternative https://restya.com/board/comparison.
Re: Ask HN: Solo devs, how do you plan your development?
#189I have a file called todo.txt, with the current tasks at the top, and everything else below that. It is in version control. As I finish stuff, I delete it out of the file. I add new stuff towards the top if I want to do it soon, towards the bottom if I want to save it for later. For things which are just ideas, I have a second file called brainstorm.txt.
I use a similar approach, but with a VSC extension. I use this one: https://github.com/fabiospampinato/vscode-todo-plus , although I bet there are plenty others and for your editor of choice.
This is awesome! Thanks.
Re: Ask HN: Solo devs, how do you plan your development?
#190I really like to brainstorm by putting sticky notes on a wall (my process https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/agile-requirements-proce...), but https://app.storiesonboard.com/ is where I manage it after that.