The Return of Fancy Tools • Hacker News Board

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#51

Post by AlotOfReading » Sat, May 15, 2021, 2:53 AM UTC

greatgoat420 wrote: post #37

steveklabnik wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it’s all very opinionated. I think at this point I am borderline “I would rather have no bug tracker than Jira.” Issues isn’t perfect but it’s the best I’ve ever used.

I have never used Jira, could you say more about your feelings towards it? Currently we use an old in-house solution and are thinking of shifting.

The biggest issue by far is how slow it is. I don't mean bubble sort slow, I mean deliberately engineered quantum bogosort. A cache-less refresh for me on a blazing fast dev machine takes between 3-10 minutes on a normal day, though it might only take 1m if the internet gods are feeling particularly merciful. That leads to all sorts of avoidance because using it for anything takes long enough to be worth documenting as a ticket in its own right.

Compounding this issue is how many clicks even "simple" tasks take because of their bizarre choices. Basic necessities like changing ticket status can't be done without opening separate pages, etc.

One you've actually managed to create a ticket and assign status, good luck finding it later. Backlogs inevitably evolve into infinite swamps that no one knows the full contents of. Not helping is the fact that the search is terrible. I often vaguely recollect some detail or test procedure that someone helpfully mentioned/documented in a ticket somewhere before closing. I successfully find maybe a third or less of those.

Also it's highly customizable, so any skills or knowledge from one company don't apply to the installation at any other.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#52

Post by jes » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:01 AM UTC

Edit code like a grandpa in neovim...

Love it!

At 61 I am a grandpa, prefer GNU Emacs over vi, but still have fond memories of using vi on 4.2BSD systems. Long time ago!

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#53

Post by greatgoat420 » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:02 AM UTC

AlotOfReading wrote: post #51

greatgoat420 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never used Jira, could you say more about your feelings towards it? Currently we use an old in-house solution and are thinking of shifting.

The biggest issue by far is how slow it is. I don't mean bubble sort slow, I mean deliberately engineered quantum bogosort. A cache-less refresh for me on a blazing fast dev machine takes between 3-10 minutes on a normal day, though it might only take 1m if the internet gods are feeling particularly merciful. That leads to all sorts of avoidance because using it for anything takes long enough to be worth documenting…

Thanks for replying, I think I get it now. We use SharePoint which has very similar issues.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#54

Post by runevault » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:02 AM UTC

aflag wrote: post #4

drawkbox wrote: post #2

Good games should be easy to approach and difficult to master . Good tools should be easy to approach with the ability to customize and do more advanced actions, but never difficult Good tools and products encapsulate complexity but still allow access to it where needed. Good tools aim to simplify complexity, not complexify simplicity. Good engineers and product people make tools that aim to simplify. Make it approac…

I don't think good tools are necessarily easy to approach. Some of the best tools I know have quite a steep learning curve. A good tool is one that gives you power. It makes difficult and complicated tasks easy and simple. It may come with the cost of getting good with using the tool, but once you master it, you don't know how you lived without it.

A good tool picks an audience and builds everything with them in mind. You can make a tool aimed at beginners of some discipline with the understanding it may not satisfy power users, but that doesn't make it a bad one, just bad for that audience. Same in the other direction, tools aimed at optimizing power users ability to do their task may seem completely impossible to a beginner, and that's totally okay.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#55

Post by bradknowles » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:06 AM UTC

greatgoat420 wrote: post #37

steveklabnik wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it’s all very opinionated. I think at this point I am borderline “I would rather have no bug tracker than Jira.” Issues isn’t perfect but it’s the best I’ve ever used.

I have never used Jira, could you say more about your feelings towards it? Currently we use an old in-house solution and are thinking of shifting.

Jira is very sensitive to the configuration you build for it, and the hardware it is running on. The full configuration for Jira would make an Encyclopedia look small. Get that wrong (as many places do), and it is hard to use and dead-dog slow, at the best of times. But if you have a real Jira wizard who can configure things correctly, then it can easily be the fastest and easiest way to organize your development and operational support tasks.

I’ve seen both good and bad Jira configurations. And I’ve seen them run on both good and bad hardware solutions.

There is a reason why Atlassian is getting rid of Enterprise Jira, because it’s really hard to build a good hardware solution for running Jira properly.

I submit that anyone who hates Jira probably has not seen a good Jira configuration. And anyone who loves Jira probably has seen a good configuration and doesn’t understand what everyone else is complaining about.

Jira is a real Jekyll vs. Hyde type of tool. In my experience, how you feel about Jira says much more about the type of configuration you’ve seen than anything else.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#56

Post by greatgoat420 » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:14 AM UTC

bradknowles wrote: post #55

greatgoat420 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never used Jira, could you say more about your feelings towards it? Currently we use an old in-house solution and are thinking of shifting.

Jira is very sensitive to the configuration you build for it, and the hardware it is running on. The full configuration for Jira would make an Encyclopedia look small. Get that wrong (as many places do), and it is hard to use and dead-dog slow, at the best of times. But if you have a real Jira wizard who can configure things correctly, then it can easily be the fastest and easiest way to organize your development and…

Thanks! I hadn't heard about this before!

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#57

Post by peterarmstrong » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:27 AM UTC

The cycle also goes hand-in-hand with languages and frameworks. I use VSCode for Ruby on Rails editing, but I don't need to. With TypeScript, however, it's a huge win -- just as IDEA or Eclipse were essential for Java, back in the day.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#58

Post by 0xCMP » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:31 AM UTC

It's basically cause of mobile. Simple tools often involve using files. Using plain text files too. I don't think the pendulum will swing back the same. Files are a bad abstraction. Databases via HTTP APIs are far more reliable for using between all our devices. Syncing files without something like Git is very painful and for Git to be used the user themselves need to be able to handle the diff themselves correctly. And they'd need to do this all on Mobile. It basically kills plain files for anyone except the most advanced users and requires very complicated apps (e.g. the wonderful WorkingCopy on iOS). The problem yet to be solved for normal users is how do you take advantage of that convenience while still letting users own their data?

There are some attempts but basically at the end of the day it'll require more support from the various operating systems (mainly mobile). There needs to be some underlying open data format which can be synced easily that recreates a database locally that apps can query directly and optionally some way to proxy those requests to a central service when the device can't/shouldn't have direct access to that database (lack of storage, lack of compute to run the database or app, lack of privilege's to have possible direct access all of the data.)

If you can't solve encryption, syncing, and ability to easily use the same rich data between devices and operating systems you won't reverse the trends to move everything to these fancy tools which almost all end up being centralized and requiring the user to be online regularly even for data which only their own devices would ever be using.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#59

Post by cryptonector » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:35 AM UTC

plorkyeran wrote: post #43

madeofpalk wrote: post #7

> JIRA was replaced by GitHub issues This is absolutely... not the case. Sure, for some kinds of projects Github Issues might do, but for anything "real" Github's issue and project management is a serious regression. --- These tools are not replacing anything, but addressing broader and broader markets. They lower the barrier to entry and bring more people into the fold (perhaps at the expense at having a lower ceili…

Jira is an amazing argument for the idea that having too many features is itself an anti-feature, and github issues' second biggest strength compared to it (behind the integration with github) is specifically that it doesn't try to do everything.

Or an argument for doing it right. It's got a query language that looks a bit like SQL, just... not SQL. It's got an ugly but responsive UI. It's easy to over-customize.

The real problem is that it gets over-customized, and as with all databases, schema is forever, so after enough years of using it you have: ugly remnants of how you used to do things mixed with the ugly new things you're doing, and a devops team dedicated to maintaining and further over-over-customizing your JIRA instance.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#60

Post by sverhagen » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:43 AM UTC

bitexploder wrote: post #44

First, this is an interesting take, and I think there is some kernels to consider in it. However, the author is painting very broadly with a large brush and smudging a lot. I have been happily using PyCharm/IntelliJ since what feels like the dawn of time. It is a perfectly complex and rewarding Fancy Tool. People still use IDEs for C/C++ this whole time, etc. I think the author is taking their personal journey and ex…

Jira still for the complex stuff, with many teams in enterprises. But maybe less than it was in simple projects, with one-to-one relationships between issues tracking and repository?