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Pivotal Tracker will shut down

pivotaltracker.com

141–150 of 271 posts

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#141
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What hosting providers would you recommend?

Both OVH and Hetzner offers unmetered connections for their dedicated servers, only had good experience with both so far (besides when one of OVH's data centers burned down, but hoping that was a exceptional situation)

Backup to Backblaze B2, or, depending on architecture, rely on their object storage for hot data (depending on data cache and tier requirements). They partner with Cloudflare for free egress (on the Backblaze side) of public content as well.

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-and-cloudflare-part...

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#142
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linear is the one I've settled on, it stays out of my way. For now. Looking at the competition it's only a matter of time before it becomes bloated to justify valuations. https://linear.app/

As soon as the AI features start showing up in Linear, it's time to jump ship. You know for sure VCs are pushing for that in the weekly meeting.

If it takes the pressure off, then go ahead and add those features.

But carve it in immutable, legal stone that there will always be a classic (reddit style: old) version of the product that's feature-complete but maintained.

... my suspicion is there's actually legalese somewhere that mandates the continuity of old.reddit.com. Otherwise, I'm at a loss to explain its continued existence in light of aggressive app pushing.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#143
I always loved Tracker and it sucks it got sold and resold until they shut it down like this. I am using Linear but it doesn't have simplicity of Tracker tbh.

Maybe Tracker belongs in different time that we will not go back to, who knows.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#144

RIP PT. I can't tell you how much this piece of software changed my life. Working at Pivotal (the very early days of Cloud Foundry), taught me so much about how to develop software and products. It taught me how to work closely with people (pair programming for the win!). How to iterate and pay attention to velocity. How to write stories. How to polish a turd over time. I use these skills every single day. You will b…

> How to polish a turd over time.

You mean iterating and pivoting.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#145
post #52
post #9

Unfortunate. Of all the PM tools I've used, I hated Pivotal the least. It made it easy to do the things that were frequently done. It limited customization down to a sane level. And it generally seemed to stay out of the way (significant look at Jira).

Linear is the one I've settled on, it stays out of my way. For now. Looking at the competition it's only a matter of time before it becomes bloated to justify valuations. https://linear.app/

> bloated

This is like Excel - nobody needs more than 20% of all its features... but a different 20% for everyone. Project Management/Tracking needs can vary a lot between orgs or even people.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#146
post #127
post #47

The thing that I always liked about Pivotal is that it was visibly obvious that there was only one queue. It forced everyone to ruthlessly prioritize and make the hard decisions. In this moment, do you want me working on this bug, or this new feature? You have to decide - you get one or the other. It avoided the "Everything is a high priority" dilemma.

That sounds more like a disastrous missing feature to me. A good productivity tool doesn’t dictate how teams work. I’d rather have a tool that’s more customizable.

I know managers love Jira — a poster child for customizability — esp product managers, but I have yet to meet a software engineer who does.

It simply slows everyone down, but when it's your only tool for tracking work, it's still better than nothing.

Now, the problem with Jira is not necessarily customizability but that it's dog slow, complex, integrations suck, and permissions system is chaotic. Still, I have yet to see fully customizable work tracking system that's better made than Jira.

But also, a fixed set of features does not force you to ascribe the same meaning to them like the authors intended: I've used "bug" tracking systems to manage large projects with great success (including big features, enhancements, but also big and small fixes).

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#148
post #145
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linear is the one I've settled on, it stays out of my way. For now. Looking at the competition it's only a matter of time before it becomes bloated to justify valuations. https://linear.app/

> bloated This is like Excel - nobody needs more than 20% of all its features... but a different 20% for everyone. Project Management/Tracking needs can vary a lot between orgs or even people.

That's not really true: witness Jira boards which are really kanban boards replicated everywhere. Jira, by now, is mostly a database of issues with a terrible management interface that's only accessed through the "boards" features.

At least in the "agile" (actual or lookalike) software development.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#149
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I do love the smell of fresh optimism in the morning! I think the biggest challenges are that a) the vast majority of solo devs capable of pulling this off quickly are well-employed, and b) the timeline for MVP++ is effectively January 1st, else the migrators will make different decisions. And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch.

The real reason this won’t work is that Pivotal obviously isn’t making good money if VMWare is cool with shutting it down. If it was some kind of excellent business to be in it wouldn’t be shutting down. An analogy would be to say that it would be a great business model to clone Redbox now that it’s gone. But it’s not because its competitors ate it alive. Sure, there are a bunch of Redbox customers that liked the pro…

I’ve worked at a couple places that made the mistake of thinking they could charge a premium for artisanal hand crafted web pages. You get all the customers with deep seated control issues, willing to pay a premium to have everything exactly how they like it, and one by one sticker shock works as therapy and the price they will pay per artisanal, hand crafted webpage slowly declines until it costs you more to run the system than the customers will pay.

And in the most recent case of this I’m aware of, at least two different groups got to sell the company to new suckers before the bill came due.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#150
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I do love the smell of fresh optimism in the morning! I think the biggest challenges are that a) the vast majority of solo devs capable of pulling this off quickly are well-employed, and b) the timeline for MVP++ is effectively January 1st, else the migrators will make different decisions. And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch.

The real reason this won’t work is that Pivotal obviously isn’t making good money if VMWare is cool with shutting it down. If it was some kind of excellent business to be in it wouldn’t be shutting down. An analogy would be to say that it would be a great business model to clone Redbox now that it’s gone. But it’s not because its competitors ate it alive. Sure, there are a bunch of Redbox customers that liked the pro…

"Good money" to a company with $13B revenue a year is a lot different than "good money" to a solo developer. If you can pick up six figures a year in revenue and keep things small enough to run solo, it's a good business for you.
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