Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Return of Fancy Tools

macwright.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 224 posts

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#171

Post by treeman79 »

vasco wrote: post #163
laurent92 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree that Jira isn’t the snappiest tool It is forbidden in the ToS 3.3 to “(i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products“. https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service

I also confirm that in my experience the performance of the JIRA Cloud installation has been mostly fine. It's not amazingly fast but only having used JIRA cloud, even with loads of projects and so on, I always thought it was weird to read all the stories of poor performance.

Compared to something like pivotal tracker, Jira feels like trying to swim in glue.

It just gets in the way. Individual actions are tolerable-ish. But it’s never setup right. Constantly hunting for the field that is blocking story creation. Permission issues all over the place.

Finding things is often nightmarish.

Management basically doesn’t care, and doesn’t want to put effort into making it work in sane fashion. Yet freak out if team wants to use something else. So we do all our planning and story tracking in google sheets instead.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#172

Post by paulryanrogers »

mtzet wrote: post #80
solraph wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That integration piece is key. The people who want to replace Atlassian tools usually focus one part of the suite (usually Jira or Confluence), but to replace them you all you need a set of tools that work together. It's not just issue tracking, but alerting, issue management ITSM tools, source control, CI/CD, release management, documentation and I don't know what else that all need talk to each other and provide tr…

On the other hand, I find the integration between Atlassian tools to be pretty barebones. It feels very clear to me that Atlassian tools are really developed separately, with a separate jira task to integrate specific parts. There's no "coherency" to them. You are right that it's difficult to replace the entire Atlassian suite. The thing about Atlassian is that when there's if there's a box to check on a feature list…

Second this. Even within JIRA itself the markup it accepts is inconsistent. Back ticks vs double brackets being the bane of my existence.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#173

Post by treeman79 »

mytherin wrote: post #132
jcelerier wrote: post #106

> Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate, no it was not. people didn't migrate from VS to Sublime, they migrated from notepad++ to Sublime. I have never met anyone who stopped using IDEs once they started, except maybe for VSCode with a few hundred plug-ins to reconstruct an IDE piece-wise (but with much less "integration" between the different plug-ins)

Maybe I'm the odd one out, but this describes me to a T. I started programming primarily using Visual Studio on Windows which I used for several years. It has a nice debugger, but the IDE in general was so painfully slow and bloated it actively took me out of my programming flow. I'm also in general not a big fan of all the clicking around that you needed to do in there. Configuring projects using the Visual Studio I…

Many years ago I ran vim as an IDE for several years and was quite happy. Eventually it got bloated and I just could not keep it functional without massive time investment. Maintaining indexes was biggest issue if I recall.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#174

Post by ziml77 »

jcelerier wrote: post #106

> Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate, no it was not. people didn't migrate from VS to Sublime, they migrated from notepad++ to Sublime. I have never met anyone who stopped using IDEs once they started, except maybe for VSCode with a few hundred plug-ins to reconstruct an IDE piece-wise (but with much less "integration" between the different plug-ins)

I wonder if the shifts they're talking about have really been true migrations. There's constantly new people and companies entering/exiting the industry. New entrants are likely to use whatever is in vogue, so overall there is going to be a shift in what's dominant as time goes on even if no one were to actually switch from one tool to another.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#175

Post by michaelt »

rkangel wrote: post #159
randallsquared wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've got work to do that isn't tool shuffling. Is most of that work waiting for Jira to respond to your action so you can take the next action? I don't know if it's possible to have an adequately fast installation of Jira (since I've never seen one in a decade of Jira use at various places), but I do notice that people who have to put a lot of things into Jira seem to mostly use text editors or word processors to a…

> I don't know if it's possible to have an adequately fast installation of Jira That's not my experience of Jira. The cloud version is the best, and our current on-prem installation is perfectly fine. I agree that Jira isn't the snappiest tool to use, but I don't sit there consciously waiting for it to do stuff.

No doubt it depends on how you use it, but I find it very slow.

For example, I just tested following a permalink to a comment on a ticket. After 1.3 seconds I see the ticket - but it takes more than 7 seconds until I'm scrolled to the right comment, all the ticket details are loaded, and so on.

And the slow-ass lazy loading means you daren't click something between 1.3 seconds and 7 seconds, because at any moment a new button or linked issue box or the addition of status icons next to links or something will reflow the page.

In my experience this shitty performance is baked into every single interaction with Jira. You want to create an issue? Two seconds to show up the form. You click the 'epic link' dropdown on that form? A full second just to display a dropdown menu. Oh, and you also want to open the 'label' dropdown? That'll be 1.8 seconds.

And all those are on Cloud Jira, at a weekend, on a <300 ticket project, on a powerful developer workstation.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#176

Post by anoncake »

laurent92 wrote: post #161
rkangel wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know if it's possible to have an adequately fast installation of Jira That's not my experience of Jira. The cloud version is the best, and our current on-prem installation is perfectly fine. I agree that Jira isn't the snappiest tool to use, but I don't sit there consciously waiting for it to do stuff.

> I agree that Jira isn’t the snappiest tool It is forbidden in the ToS 3.3 to “(i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products“. https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service

Even if that clause is enforceable, you can just tell people about it instead. No company would try to prevent talk about their products' good performance.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#177

Post by jschwartzi »

burlesona wrote: post #17
breakfastduck wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm lost now when it comes to project / dev / story etc management tools. No idea what the best option is, any recommendations for tools developers will actually use or do you just need to do a custom integration with github issues?

I switched from Jira to Linear and am very happy with it. Just the right mix of power, completeness, and customization, without any fussy fiddling. It’s also blazing fast.

Linear.app is way faster and tighter than JIRA, but lacks a lot of features that I actually really need in my job:

* Advanced Roadmapping - JIRA will, given a pile of issues, sort them and fake-assign them to individuals on your team to determine how long it will take you to complete a project. This is way more powerful than burndown charts and cycles when you're planning a hardware project with a tightly-defined deadline. Without it I have to drop back to spreadsheets to provide any insight into when a project will be completed. It's especially important when the business peels engineers off the project.

* Time-based estimating - JIRA lets me plug hours in for estimates instead of railroading me into T-shirt sizes, which means I can actually use the tool to give an accurate estimate of when we'll be done. Linear requires you to calibrate your expectations by running a few cycles first, which makes it a really bad fit for projects that have a defined end date.

I think Linear has a lot of potential for teams that don't work to fixed deadlines, but for my purposes it's just a very fast spreadsheet.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#178

Post by dragonwriter »

aunty_helen wrote: post #40
dragonwriter wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If jira didn't have the ability to make it crap Then your managers would buy a tool that did instead. > maybe just try not to smush existing ms CRM workflows into a tool for devs. If your employer wants a tool into which those workflows can be smushed and wants devs integrated into those flows, that’s what they’ll get. Blaming a tool for supporting your management’s desires is...missing the people obviously respons…

Jira existed as a better product before this and gained popularity without this functionality. I used and championed old jira in this business but hadn't used it for some time. A better realisation would have been that one tool isn't going to integrate everything in your business from developing software to dealing with customers billing.

> A better realisation would have been that one tool isn't going to integrate everything in your business from developing software to dealing with customers billing.

The trend (e.g., ERP and BMS) is definitely toward that in a much deeper way than broad use of JIRA alone represents. The “better realization” is probably more subtle, and involves more respect for the line workers in defining how their work is done and what the requirements are for the components of a broad enterprise-wide automation system that they interact with are, and balancing that with the information preferences at higher levels so that the latter are satisfied (and maybe compromised in some ways) in a way which preserves the ability of the line workers to deliver business value.

But, in either case, not having that realization is management issue, not a tool vendor issue.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#179

Post by prennert »

breakfastduck wrote: post #19
burlesona wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from Jira to Linear and am very happy with it. Just the right mix of power, completeness, and customization, without any fussy fiddling. It’s also blazing fast.

We're running Monday. Has to be used by approx 60-80 users mix of dev / old school projects & support. I'll check out Linear. Been looking at Clubhouse too.

We are using clubhouse after looking at a lot of solutions. We all like it as it is quick, low complexity and does not introduce artificial barriers between the teams.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#180

Post by egypturnash »

Fancy tools never left, you just stopped using them. I've been using Adobe Illustrator for art since before anything mentioned in this post even existed. Except Dreamweaver and Vim, if "neovim" counts as Vim. It is a complicated tool that has a lot of ways to easily make useless effects, and a lot of ways to easily make beautiful art.

Also most of the professional writers I know don't write in Word, they write in Scrivener, which is essentially an IDE for prose. Then they export to Word and use this as a common interchange format with everyone down the line in the publishing workflow. It is a very fancy tool.

And really I dunno if NeoVim counts as not "fancy", the first highlight on its page is a section about how extensible it is. It's got two languages to write plugins in, with several screens to scroll down in the list of "plugins and applications that leverage the Neovim API". That is some fancy-ass shit right there.

Post reply on HN