I spent 6 years building my Kanban as I hated how managers run the boards

ookovooo 3 days ago 36 commentsRead Article on npmjs.com

FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

38% Positive

Analyzed from 1021 words in the discussion.

Discussion (36 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

dvh•about 3 hours ago

I always giggle when I look at the promo screenshot of fancy new to-do app that is supposed to solve the project management once and for all, and there are like 6 items on it instead of 200.

SOLAR_FIELDS•about 3 hours ago

It’s simply very early on in the endless lifecycle of project management:

Simple kanban is great! It’s simple! Okay, new users, new feature requests. Wow now I’ve got a really robust product but still it only solves problems for maybe 30% of people. Let’s add more! Eventually we have converged to Jira and instead of doing a few things really well we now do everything poorly. At this point you’ve probably got enough cargo culted corporate bureaucrats using your product to survive for quite awhile as you ride the wave of revenue into the slow tide of mediocrity. Then the death and rebirth as the new starry eyed project management tool begins as YetAnotherTrelloClone

KronisLV•about 2 hours ago

> Eventually we have converged to Jira and instead of doing a few things really well we now do everything poorly.

Is a system that does everything within its scope well not conceivable? If it is, does systems ending up like Jira come as a result of scope creep and gradual evolution (not designing the whole thing up front with its admittedly huge scope), not enough development effort or just wanting to ship things soon instead of spending 5 years making the damn thing be good? And then, how do we get there - a Jira killer, that’d be as good as Linux (or maybe BSD) is to OSes? It’s weird that project management has either small focused tools or big ones that are also bad in a variety of ways.

dzogchen•about 3 hours ago

The best Kanban board is a physical one. You are also not going to be able to put 200 items on it.

That’s a feature, not a bug.

TipsForCanoes•about 2 hours ago

The fundamental idea behind Kanban was WIP Constraint Management.

Unfortunately, so many people have been doing cargo-cult agile for so long that now the word "kanban" means 'task board with columns' to most people.

It should not be possible to put 200 items into a column on a Kanban board unless the team is actually shown to have the capacity to work on them without causing a bottleneck.

okovooo•about 2 hours ago

"WIP" does not work - it only seems that you are in control of the process. It may work for the same type of tasks (hammering a nail), but in my practice, where all tasks are different, it did not work anywhere.

alemwjsl•about 3 hours ago

It also looks like Jira.

jaffa2•about 2 hours ago

What does this do? Do i need it? What was it about the managers running the boards that was hated? Why does this solve that issue? So many questions

dizhn•about 2 hours ago

Made me think of a non-tech manager I had once who when we presented the newly installed bug tracker (of which we had none prior) that said . "This is great. You don't expect ME to use it right?")

goopthink•about 2 hours ago

“I spent 6 years building my Kanban as I hated how managers run the boards”… only to discover that problem was the managers, not the technology, and that the tech could be rebuilt in a weekend with LLMs?

orphereus•about 2 hours ago

The amount of comments shilling LLMs on HN is skyrocketing. Could be a recession indicator?

ketzu•about 3 hours ago

In a team I worked, we had full control over how we wanted to use the board. But the senior people just refused to engage with it, as anything they did on the board would make them accountable.

My lesson: Boards can be awful and useless even without managers running them! :)

I've been using a simple, standalone kanban to manage my own tasks, though.

SOLAR_FIELDS•about 2 hours ago

I just require PR's to have tickets attached or it fails CI and otherwise use LLM's to write analytics to track what people are doing these days. Asking devs to hold themselves accountable is an exercise in futility in my experience. In a world where you can do that, why even bother with tickets outside of planning the work done? Might as well just transcribe your standup and turn it into tickets that way too.

okovooo•3 days ago

Usually, everything is set up "for the manager"—the way they prefer to view the project. As a result, a tool that is supposed to help the team becomes a burden. When you work across multiple teams, the constant filtering and scrolling turn into a nightmare. You waste your energy fighting the interface before you even start working. I believe that one glance at the board should be enough to instantly see where we are, who is overloaded, and what is stuck. That’s why I’m building ooko. To finally make the board a tool for the entire team.

darreninthenet•about 3 hours ago

A decent tool could surely define multiple different views of the same information?

Stevvo•about 3 hours ago

If you really did spend 6 years building this, then it's an excellent example of why you should be vibe coding instead; I don't see anything here that could not be made in 6 minutes instead of 6 years.

helloplanets•about 1 hour ago

Six years? I think you're not being candid.

Why is the landing page 100% gated behind a sign up form? Why is this on NPM to begin with? All around weird.

Could be a trojan horse. Just a heads up to anyone about to download this.

This does not help: "Task management service based on the Kanban methodology. Helps decompose the task pipeline and speeds up all stages of your work" Sounds 100% generated by AI tbh.

okovooo•39 minutes ago

I do it alone in my free time. NPM is the easiest way to publish an application. You can install the app locally at your place. And there is also a TG channel, there are posts on the functionality for review.

helloplanets•26 minutes ago

I'm supposed to just blindly boot it up on my computer, with the license explicitly banning decompiling and disassembling the code, so it could sensibly reviewed?

Can you see why I'd be concerned about that?

_the_inflator•about 2 hours ago

I like the guy’s stubbornness. We all have been there.

I understand his account as releasing daily frustration in a constructive way. We all hate/love Jira, Excel whatever but the alternatives are worse and instead of one bad solution 20 different perfect apps to use as a substitute won’t cut it.

We all are or have been there.

I like the guy. It is funny.

zeafoamrun•about 3 hours ago

I looked at some off the shelf task tracking and kanban packages and they didn't do quite what I wanted so I just vibe coded one up. We use it at home now.

My wife even made a special hidden mode for her game https://www.kanbanchaos.com so it can act as a frontend for our actual task tracker. Full taskception

eterm•about 3 hours ago

If this will solve the problem with boards, you need to be able to answer 2 questions:

1. What does this do that Trello doesn't?

2. What does Trello do that this doesn't?

pif•about 2 hours ago

I keep stating proudly to any team mate and any manager that I've never ever needed a board to know what I had to work on.

maxloh•about 2 hours ago

That is a really limiting license.

Per the LICENSE file:

  Modification Ban: The User has no right to change, modify, decompile, disassemble or create derivative works based on the Program.

  Distribution Ban: The User has no right to distribute the Program without the prior written permission of the Licensor.

gwerbin•about 2 hours ago

It's source-available proprietary software that happens to be distributed through NPM.

esperent•33 minutes ago

Is there a username and password for the demo?

subwatch_dev•about 1 hour ago

Six years of sticking with one product is the hardest part of solo building. Most of us (myself included) struggle with the opposite problem — shipping too many things and not going deep enough on any of them.

The convergence-to-Jira pattern mentioned in another comment is real, but I think the answer isn't "don't add features" — it's "add features for a narrower audience." A Kanban for 3-person dev teams will always beat a Kanban for everyone.

Curious about your distribution strategy. After 6 years, what's actually working for getting users — SEO, word of mouth, communities?

reactordev•29 minutes ago

Claude could zero-shot this.

TipsForCanoes•about 3 hours ago

Can you show the capacity and flow management parts?