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Show HN: Tara – A free Jira alternative, now with Gitlab

tara.ai

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Re: Show HN: Tara – A free Jira alternative, now with Gitlab

#72
post #2

Hi HN! We last crossed paths 6 months ago, when we shared Tara 1.0, a simple Jira alternative. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033387 I'm one of the creators of Tara, and with support and feedback from the community, we've been hard at work building this v1.5 release over 24 sprints and 500+ pull requests. Several of you asked for an improved Github sync, PRs and commits tracked in tasks, alongside a Gitlab in…

To set up my question, maybe I should share a sort of hazy crackpot vision or dream. So when I look at Git, I see a variety of postmodernism that's like “look, we’re not being pretentiously intellectual or even pessimistic—we’re being realistic, software just is a postmodern world, Alice and Bob both have software that they call ‘Linux’ on their laptops, and they just aren’t the same source code, but they are both Linux, and trying to assess which one is the “true” Linux really does devolve into asking questions about power and basically in this case the power is vested ultimately in one king, Linus Torvalds, who says which one is more modern, and that’s fine as long as you understand that it’s arbitrary and anyone can fork the project at any time and create a rival power-structure and so forth.” Like, these ideas that I made fun of when I was a kid turn out to be amazingly practical things as finally revealed by git enlightenment.

I would summarize the problems of various bugtrackers including Jira as being insufficiently “up with the times” therefore. They reflect the old modernist approach to truth. Schedules, deadlines, when was this “done”. But we know in software that really you want your source of truth of your bugtracker to basically be in the same Git repository as your code: one and the same commit needs to simultaneously close a bug as needs to properly change the source code to fix that bug, because the bug may be fixed in your “staging” codebase but that bugfix may not yet be deployed to “prod.” A reversion merged into prod as a hotfix needs to suddenly re-open the bug that we said was fixed-in-prod because now it no longer is. All of that. That's my hazy crackpot vision. :)

Given all that, there is also a great difficulty with people using workflows like GitFlow which have the same “old way of doing things” misunderstandings. It’s not that those workflows aren’t good, they are good—for SVN repositories. You apply them to a Git repository and then you have this strange tension where the workflow and the VCS are working at cross-purposes sometimes. So it's also things like GitLab's CI/CD being a file checked into Git. This sounds great until you realize that nobody is expecting postmodernism to suddenly pop up here. “How did you merge that thing into prod when all of our admins were unreachable? Admins are supposed to have to push the button.” “Well, I was really in a bind, so I did something I would have never normally done: I pushed up my own branch `fix-master`, and in that branch I changed the CI/CD file to trigger deploys to production on pushes to `fix-master` instead of `master`.” But I had to!” Git was like “hegemony? what hegemony? if `master` has power then everyone has power.” Hah.

So my question is, based on this description, I am not sure that I see you have “drunk the same Kool-aid” about Git, I am instead seeing a declaration that you want something fast-and-easy-and-supports-Git.

Which, like, is fine. I don’t want to come across as crapping on your invention with a dream that I absolutely admit is hazy and crackpot, right? You have actually done the work and I am hypothetical and I have mad respect for you and your work. But I am sharing kind of my bigger vision to ask, “do you have a bigger vision? is it different than mine, some more systematic structure?” Is Tara just an easy way to do something like Jira with Git, or do you have a fundamentally new concept in mind that you are headed towards that will change how we track issues with our software?

Re: Show HN: Tara – A free Jira alternative, now with Gitlab

#74
post #26

Is self-hosted on the roadmap?

One would hope, that's one of Jiras best features, even if Atlassian clearly doesn't agree. I get why they want to compare Tara to Jira, but when you look at what companies actually do with Jira, then you'll hit a wall rather quickly with pretty much everything else. Like them or not, Atlassians product integrate rather well, and you can "easily" customize them to integrate into pretty much everything else. We have J…

I think that "nonfunctional" is a bit of an undersell. I've used Confluence for years and while I don't think the search is great by any means, it's certainly usable once you figure out its quirks. I think we are all spoiled by how great Google is about edge cases and deriving meaning from your queries and we are too quick to judge other search offerings.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A free Jira alternative, now with Gitlab

#75
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For us, the key was to build a simple Jira alternative. A good PM tool should do the basics, and get out of the way. Personal opinion, so many PM tools tend to be bloated and each view ends up causing more mental overload for the team, EM and PM. We've tried to focus on speed with performance and keeping things simple.

Jira is a project management tool? I think that one of the only things we don't use it for.

That's surprising to hear. What do you use for this purpose then?

Re: Show HN: Tara – A free Jira alternative, now with Gitlab

#76
https://www.atlassian.com

https://tara.ai

Your branding is awfully similar to Atlassian. Not saying it's intentional, but considering you are pitching yourself as a Jira alternative, it would be wise to differentiate yourselves a bit more.

Specifically talking about the logo and color.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A free Jira alternative, now with Gitlab

#77
post #64
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! Co-founder/CTO of Tara here. We take privacy around your data very seriously. We're thinking about the ML training model as a "walled garden", ie recommendations are based on your past sprint activity, effort load, tasks completed during a sprint, etc. and are exclusive to your organization. In the future, if we decided to do benchmarking (for eg quick recommendations on how companies in your industry are runnin…

Interesting, just had this idea - would it be possible to feed the model with wrong data and make it giving bad suggestions to competitors who opted in?

Ha! Yes to some extent it would but that would really mean either a) we decided to run recommendations using a sparse model or b) we never validated the data or kept a watch on models when they were trained/retrained. This type of manipulation is typically likely when you're much larger and have alot of bots involved on the platform.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A free Jira alternative, now with Gitlab

#79
post #68
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not yet but it's on the roadmap! Several pen source repositories are requesting this feature as well, to monitor development with their contributors and we need to ship this. We've discovered there are very few options for open source communities to monitor and track/report on progress - and the cost for hundreds of contributors can become prohibitive with other PM tools.

And upvoting would be good as well! Not sure how you'd authenticate or maybe allow anon votes?

I think we would just integrate with an existing tool for this vs building it ourselves.

Re: Show HN: Tara – A free Jira alternative, now with Gitlab

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we hope to get you dependent upon our product, and in the meantime come up with something we hope you'll be willing to pay for is not the most confidence inducing of business plans. Also, if the current plans are "free forever" have no caps on users or much of anything else and are good enough to use until they actually finish off the things worth paying for then how many folks are actually going to be inclined to pa…

The business model isn't anything special... It's just freemium. Take a look at ProfitWell for instance, they do the same thing: Give away their core product then make money on upsells. Also, building the business model as they go is pretty normal for a startup.

> building the business model as they go

This just means that what used to be free will end up costing money when whatever new features they think they can charge for won't get enough users to cover their costs.

This is especially true if the free plan is more than enough for most users. Which, if you're positioning yourself as a Jira alternative -- most users won't need in-depth AI planning for sprints.

It's not a great business plan...

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