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

16 points by okovooo 3 days ago | 19 comments

jaffa2 9 minutes 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

maxloh 12 minutes 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 2 minutes ago

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

dvh 2 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 46 minutes 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 14 minutes 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 41 minutes 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 30 minutes 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.

alemwjsl 52 minutes ago

It also looks like Jira.

goopthink 29 minutes 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 14 minutes ago

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

ketzu 42 minutes 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 24 minutes 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.

zeafoamrun 46 minutes 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

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 59 minutes ago

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

eterm 54 minutes 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?

Stevvo 39 minutes 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.

TipsForCanoes 49 minutes ago

Can you show the capacity and flow management parts?