Earlier quoted context omitted.
COVID is still a thing, and we are indeed in strange times.
When does "strange" become "normal"?
Maybe after the upcoming election? But I'm sure the next election will also make things weird.
Pivotal Tracker will shut down
171–180 of 271 posts
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Cloudflare’s subscription agreement for self-serve accounts limits serving non-HTML content, including "video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content."
Which seems to be a fine fit for a project management SaaS solution. If you have an origin with non text content, you can front it with Fastly or pay Cloudflare something enterprisey (which you should be able to do once you have traction). Regardless, this is an inexpensive content distribution and object storage architecture available vs AWS egress costs.
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If solo developers could make enterprise-grade work management systems we’d sure have a lot more of them around.
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think you'd have to consider migration all the data from Pivotal... I do. You might not have demands to migrate all data from all of your potential customers, but far, far more people than you might expect treat their issue tracking system as a system of record and external memory for a HUGE assortment of things. One hugely (and obviously) useful query chain that such a system answers is "Hey, this customer…
Obviously I meant 10% of all customers would hypothetically migrate from Pivotal to this new imaginary service, not that 10% of the data from each customer would be migrated... So 100% of the data migrated from 10% of the Pivotal user base, pretty generous assumptions I think.
> Obviously I meant...
Respectfully: if it was obvious, I wouldn't have come to the conclusion I did and written up what I wrote.
> So 100% of the data migrated from 10% of the Pivotal user base...
Yeah, maybe. I don't know how large the slice of the Pivotal Tracker userbase you'd be able to retain even if you had a perfect clone. I bet it would be notably larger than you imagine it would be... it's my understanding that it has some pretty rabid fans that used it.
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#175Free business idea: clone Pivotal Tracker as a solo dev / small team. People often ask: how do I find business ideas? Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a product that is going away. This is a validated product: people were paying for it. Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than this. All you have to do is to clone the product. You can literally market it as a Pivotal Tra…
Great idea! If you're reading this and want to connect about a clone, I'm joel@joelparkerhenderson.com.
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Honestly this is a bit like saying that the dishwashers don’t like the food being served at the restaurant.
Project management software isn’t made for the benefit of engineers, that’s on purpose. The customer is the business, not the engineer who works there.
Any issues with the engineers have with workflow really aren’t the fault of the software, it’s the fault of the project managers/engineering managers’ configurations.
You can’t blame the company that makes the paint for the choice in paint color.
Personally I think the only way Jira has dropped the ball is on page load performance.
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#177Earlier 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 best way to pull this off is to bet the tool will end up shutting down and build the replacement before it does. A good example of this is Pinboard: Maciej knew the product inside out, and he knew what being acquired by Yahoo meant. So he started building Pinboard in 2009, caught the various exodus waves from Delicious in the later years (esp. 2011) and ended up acquiring it for $35k in 2017.
I'm confused. Is Pinboard something that was built by this Maciej character? Acquired by him? What was the name of the product Yahoo bought and I assume shut down? FYI I don't see any mention of him here: https://www.pinboard.com/who-we-are
Your comment reads a lot like something you'd say during a chat with friends on a sofa in a café.
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best way to pull this off is to bet the tool will end up shutting down and build the replacement before it does. A good example of this is Pinboard: Maciej knew the product inside out, and he knew what being acquired by Yahoo meant. So he started building Pinboard in 2009, caught the various exodus waves from Delicious in the later years (esp. 2011) and ended up acquiring it for $35k in 2017.
I'm confused. Is Pinboard something that was built by this Maciej character? Acquired by him? What was the name of the product Yahoo bought and I assume shut down? FYI I don't see any mention of him here: https://www.pinboard.com/who-we-are Your comment reads a lot like something you'd say during a chat with friends on a sofa in a café.
wrong link: https://pinboard.in/popular/
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#179The 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.
I also loved that it was adamant about having specific, defined states with no customization. The issue is todo, in progress, done, delivered, accepted… that’s it. Custom issue states are a special kind of hell in JIRA.
60% yes, but 40% no, because there was nothing after "accepted" - so no way to track "in production" and "validated with users", which are the most important states. You could abuse the earlier states to do that, but then you have trouble tracking internal acceptance. Ultimately, reality just has more significant states than Tracker recognised.
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#180I remember their (pivotal) culture was very unique. Maybe the developers have tired out of mandatory pairing
Worked at CoreLogic Labs, which was 100% influenced by The Pivotal Way. It would leave me utterly tired at the end of the day from the pairing, but what a way to reduce some silos and increase productivity. 1 computer, 2 mice, and 2 keyboards. Had a few mice wars that got frustrating at times, but still loved it. Had my best manager there of my career — Guss. Quite sad that they’re shutting down Tracker as it’s just…
I remember starting at Pivotal and being shocked by the two mice, two keyboards (and two displays, mirrored) setup. At the previous XP shops i had worked at, we had one mouse, one keyboard, and one display (comprising two monitors) - sharing the physical peripherals made sharing and transferring responsibility completely natural. It seemed bizarre to me to duplicate them, introduce what you call mouse wars, and make it impossible to point at something on the screen. But of course, everyone at Pivotal insisted that theirs was the only way to do it!