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The Return of Fancy Tools

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Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#91

Post by samat »

chii wrote: post #70
sverhagen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There's a bias in HN that favours the simple and clean. But the real world is full of bureaucracies and complications due to legacy and/or politics or some other factors (like momentum). When HN users argue that certain tools (like Jira) is too complex, they imagine that a simpler tool following a simpler process would've worked. For them, may be it would, as a greenfield project, but not for the enterprise currently…

Is this complexity warranted? I mean could not the same goals be achieved by less formality and less complexity?

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#92

Post by DoingIsLearning »

samat wrote: post #91
chii wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bias in HN that favours the simple and clean. But the real world is full of bureaucracies and complications due to legacy and/or politics or some other factors (like momentum). When HN users argue that certain tools (like Jira) is too complex, they imagine that a simpler tool following a simpler process would've worked. For them, may be it would, as a greenfield project, but not for the enterprise currently…

Is this complexity warranted? I mean could not the same goals be achieved by less formality and less complexity?

Most Engineering teams would probably work frictionlessly with any simple Kanban style board.

The pull force in JIRA is how much it gives PM's and other managers a feeling of air traffic control visbility. It ends up serving as a medium for less technical people to digest and participate in a project.

The features that in my opinion keep Atlassian profitable is all the automatic reports and analytics features more so than the daily work functionality.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#93

Post by eyelidlessness »

breakfastduck wrote: post #11
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…

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?

- Still my preferred solution: real cards on a real board. Physical space limits prevent overload in a lot of ways.

- Very seriously discussed prototyping a remote robotically operated version of a real physical board with a friend when the pandemic started, but we both got too busy.

- Trello, with most optional things not turned on, is still the closest thing to a real kanban board. Do go ahead and enable GH integration, but don’t turn on the zillion things that turn it into yet another Jira.

- AirTable’s kanban view is surprisingly good, but it’s fundamentally a shared spreadsheet and a lot of UI/UX confusion comes from that because any filtering or sorting you do is global to others using the same view.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#94

Post by eyelidlessness »

madeofpalk wrote: post #10
typeofnandev wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only it _was_ the case!

Sliding in here with the hot take, but Jira can actually be pretty good! Github is terrible at project management. The problem with Jira (or at least used to) is that it has so much complexities that let people make it overly complicated.

I hate that I agree with this but...

I soured on Jira because my first experience with it was a horrible Rube Goldberg configuration on a self hosted instance.

Years passed, I tried a bunch of different ways to use GH Issues as a primary tracking tool. It works but it’s... blah. It’s a good outward facing tool, it’s not good for tracking internal work. Because there’s no organizing principle.

My last job forced me to use Jira again and, don’t get me wrong! It’s still bad. But given the nature of my role in that job I ended up setting up a new board and I was pretty amazed to discover that you could set up a new project with relatively sane defaults. And you can turn most of the complexity off and get almost bare bones Trello.

The only thing I couldn’t sort out to make it habitable: I really wanted to disable the “sprint” concept and have a single board without gymnastics. I don’t know if that’s just baked in or something the company configured.

In any case, that bare bones Jira setup was basically functionally equivalent to GitHub Projects, and surprisingly a better UX. Neither are great, this isn’t praise for either. But I’m just owning my bullshit and admitting I was surprised that the (now year old) modern Jira UX surprisingly didn’t torture me as much as I expected.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#95

Post by girvo »

breakfastduck wrote: post #6

Must admit my comment is spurred by the first few words but my god Dreamweaver was so good in the early 2000's. I actually got introduced to it in ICT lessons at high school. Oh Adobe. The memory of their software is so nostalgic. Don't get me started, I'll be talking about macromedia shockwave next...

RIP macromedia. That suite was the best $400 AUD I ever spent as a teenager running my own web agency in the mid to late 2000s!

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#96

Post by gknoy »

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…

    There's no "coherency" to them.
It's interesting to hear you say that. With the integrations we have with Slack and Github, I see previews, summaries, etc thrown at me when I link things

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#97

Post by cfn »

johnwheeler wrote: post #33
breakfastduck wrote: post #6

Must admit my comment is spurred by the first few words but my god Dreamweaver was so good in the early 2000's. I actually got introduced to it in ICT lessons at high school. Oh Adobe. The memory of their software is so nostalgic. Don't get me started, I'll be talking about macromedia shockwave next...

I got my start on Drumbeat which later was purchased by macromedia. I miss my spinning 3D text gifs.

Indeed, I still have one backend in production built back then with Drumbeat. Its UI was very new and rebuilt/consulted with Alan Cooper of Thunder/Visual Basic/About Face fame.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#98

Post by allset_ »

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…

I don't like Jira that much, but this is just blatantly false.

> 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

I use Jira daily, it's nowhere near this bad. It's not fast, but pages load in about 5 seconds.

> changing ticket status can't be done without opening separate pages

You select the new state from the drop-down and set it. This is available through a few different routes/views.

> good luck finding it later

Their search looks through title and description, what else do you want?

> Backlogs inevitably evolve into infinite swamps that no one knows the full contents of.

If you let them, of course. If you don't close the tickets, what did you expect to happen?

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#99

Post by girvo »

watwut wrote: post #83
AlotOfReading wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know how you have it configured, but I have to say, we dont have these problems.

Cloud JIRA itself is slow, for what it’s worth. Seconds long RTTs — which make using a CLI to bypass the web UI pointless in my experience

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#100

Post by akagr »

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…

Org mode is easy to get started with if you’re an emacs user. I am one. But before I used emacs, there was no org mode in my life. And let’s face it, while emacs and vim allow you to craft your flow, most people are gonna use something like VSCode. Emacs and Vim have not been able to escape their old school image, even with all their awesomeness.

I’d argue that ease-of-starting also includes how visible something is, since you can quickly find it and find resources for it. Most text editors don’t have org mode or have a small, half baked subset of it at best.

A lot of amazing adjectives apply to org mode. Ease of use isn’t it until it climbs over the emacs wall.

Not trying to be combative. I’d love if more people used org. Would love to be educated here if something I said isn’t accurate.

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