Tables: Tracking work for teams • Hacker News Board

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#301

Post by skaur » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:29 PM UTC

sjg007 wrote: post #255

Looking at 120 projects has anyone used or been interviewed on the https://byteboard.dev/ platform? It sounds interesting and I was wondering what people thought about it and how it works out in practice.

hello! I'm the GM on Byteboard. You can check out some candidate's take on the interview here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sargunkaur_diversityintech-hi....

We've been actively working with many different companies (Betterment, Lyft, Figma, Dropbox) who have used Byteboard to ensure a more practical interview that is more relevant to the job. We have a candidate NPS of 4.1 / 5 which we are really proud of. :)

You can also check our twitter https://twitter.com/BrentA1283/status/1301918622873460737 to hear more from candidates who have tweeted at us about their experience!

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#302

Post by pier25 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:31 PM UTC

Lightbody wrote: post #250

adrianmonk wrote: post #243

Dear crazy person who designed this web page: https://tables.area120.google.com/u/0/about#/ I am trying to read the screenshots! Quit advancing the slide show to the next screenshot after 5 seconds. I have clicked on "Project & task management" so that I can read that screenshot. That was your (missed) cue to pause the cycling of the slides. I get that you want to tease the reader by offering several different intere…

They should have consulted this :) http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/

Carousels are the worst.

If you have content that you can afford to hide, you can't afford to put it in a premium place and compete with critical content.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#303

Post by ocdtrekkie » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:34 PM UTC

drewda wrote: post #292

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Google incubator" is particularly accurate here, if you look at the tags on the blog: "Area 120". This is an app developed by one of their "let these people write random stuff" groups: https://area120.google.com/ To my knowledge, nothing majorly successful or long-term supported has ever come out of Area 120.

> To my knowledge, nothing majorly successful or long-term supported has ever come out of Area 120. Instead try evaluating the success of Area 120 by the number of Google staff members who have had their "incredible journey" itch scratched and then returned to a product or infrastructure team at Google when their Area 120 project is EOL'ed. From a corporate perspective, it's worth spending some money on throw-away pr…

I definitely understand why it benefits Google. But I don't see why a user should ever bother with an Area 120 project.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#304

Post by dreamcompiler » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:35 PM UTC

bigbossman wrote: post #235

Meta-comment: it's hilarious how every other comment is about how Google is going to kill this project. Next time a VC asks you "what are you going to do if Google builds X too?" send them a link to this discussion!

"ODG I hope they do. That means in two years' time we'll have the market to ourselves."

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#305

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:39 PM UTC

akerro wrote: post #244

bigbossman wrote: post #235

Meta-comment: it's hilarious how every other comment is about how Google is going to kill this project. Next time a VC asks you "what are you going to do if Google builds X too?" send them a link to this discussion!

I think it nicely shows lack of trust in Google and their new products.

[deleted]

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#306

Post by forgotmypw17 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:44 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #238

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plaintext would not be too complex for non-programmers. Coupled with in-file tokens, it makes for an easy format to export into anything. That's why I am using it as the base format for my forum application. At any time, the entire forum content can be exported into plaintext, which is readable by most users on most platforms (except iOS) And also can be re-imported into just about anything with a quick Perl script.

Plaintext is too complex for programmers and likely drops semantic information that is needed to reconstruct the relations in the original data. There's a reason plaintext is rarely used as the preferred method of semantic data exchange. What's our preferred method of representing images with plaintext? Audio files? Rich text, such as Google Docs? Spreadsheets (complete with formulae and attached macros)? Databases t…

I don't agree at all.

For instance, consider email or newsgroups formats, with key-value attribute headers, with the difference of putting them at the bottom of the file.

With each "item" being a text file, you could easily fit the average person's Facebook profile into a zip file of (folder-arranged) text files with the content at the top and the extra attributes (e.g. timestamp, reply-to, etc.) below.

Even for someone very active, this would only be several hundred text files per day, so several hundred thousand per year, and several million for an entire profile. With that many, you'd probably have to split them up, but for the average person with maybe several hundred thousand, that's a manageable number of textfiles to put into a zip file.

These textfiles could be almost trivially imported into a relational database with a simple script.

At the same time, the user can also browse the contents of the zip file if the folder structure is arranged thoughtfully.

Of course, I am talking about text only, not images or videos. For these, you would have to either use metadata or have a matching text-file to go with the file.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#307

Post by ksk » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

cflewis wrote: post #178

someone7x wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are all these comments about the near and inevitable death of your new product at all soul-crushing? I'm a stranger on the internet and even I can feel the burn. Good luck.

As a Googler, I'd just say it's a boring meme that shows little thought and just wastes time actually getting to interesting discussion here. It's almost akin to "first" from the old days of Slashdot or the race to mention generics whenever anything related to Go comes up. Products come and products go, this is not unique to Google. Killed By Google is cited as some sort of proof, but that goes back to _2003_, and do…

The point is, what differentiates products that come out of this project from another startup that is also struggling to stay afloat? If the answer is nothing, then why should anyone treat you any differently (because those other companies also get hit hard on that point)? Why shouldn't customers be weary about relying on your products if there isn't a commitment? You are free to call it a boring meme, but to me, these are very valid concerns. Sorry, you don't get a free pass because you're Google, and IMHO it should get scrutinized even more because its from Google for obvious reasons (poor privacy, track record of poor UI performance, s/w is often sluggish/resource hog, etc, etc)

>Then you have a company like Microsoft that keeps things around in perpetuity, but sometimes to the chagrin of users who want new features added or you get incongruent UX (you can still find plenty of very old apps in Windows 10). And this is fine too, but it's not a meme and so never comes up.

I'm not exactly the biggest fan of MS, but our company has saved tens of thousands of dollars in software costs because we could use old software designed for Win XP/7 on Win 10 w/o re-buying the software from the vendor. (Biotech s/w costs can get super crazy, esp with 21CFR validation)

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#308

Post by tyingq » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:55 PM UTC

DoctorOW wrote: post #287

benatkin wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't a guarantee. Google killed Inbox. They also regularly kill features, like community captions on YouTube. https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/31/21349401/youtube-communit... Also Reader and FeedBurner felt much like core services during their heyday.

IIRC Inbox, Reader, and Feedburner were never core products of GSuite. Just consumer products that were popular and/or well-liked. That's different from being a core part of the GSuite applications: https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en_us/features/ .

App Maker was part of GSuite. Killed off.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#309

Post by buitreVirtual » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 12:03 AM UTC

hobofan wrote: post #239

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"At Area 120, we work on 20% projects 100% of the time." It literally just has no backing by Google's corporate or business goals.

Google Maps was a 20% eons ago, wasn't it? So there is a chance that it becomes part of Google's corporate goals, e.g. making G Suite essential to businesses.

Why hasn't Google taken G suite seriously already? The only gem is Gmail. The rest feels like toys (i.e. 20% projects).

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#310

Post by carliny » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 12:06 AM UTC

foobaw wrote: post #101

I played around to see if this can actually replace Airtable. Because of its tight integration with Google apps (and how one day they could shutdown external Google Sheets API access), they probably have a decent advantage. Also free is good...Airtable pricing is not the most friendly/transparent for startups.

Hey there!

Tables PM here; your comment caught my eye as it had an interesting point about the Sheets API access changes that are coming. We do offer an API and while Tables isn't intended as a replacement for Sheets in any way, we're hoping it might be useful for folks who do need a lightweight database for their work. :)

I wanted to be fair and call out that Airtable also has a free tier (and API), and they offer a lot of great features and functionality as well that can be great for startups!

At the end of the day, you should use what fits your needs best. I wanted to create Tables because our team didn't have a great work tracking tool that quite fit our needs, and it felt like we could help other Google apps users and businesses too (especially during this time of remote working with covid). I hope you'll get to make your work life simpler, no matter whichever tool you choose.