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Hi HN! We last crossed paths 6 months ago, when we shared Tara 1.0, a simple Jira alternative. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033387 https://news.ycomb

by iba99 6y ago

Hi HN! We last crossed paths 6 months ago, when we shared Tara 1.0, a simple Jira alternative. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033387 I'm one of the creators of Tara, and with support and feedback from the community, we've been hard at work building this v1.5 release over 24 sprints and 500+ pull requests. Several of you asked for an improved Github sync, PRs and commits tracked in tasks, alongside a Gitlab integration. We've discovered from teams, just how painful Jira and Confluence can be for tracking issues, sprints and docs. Our requirements feature has also gone through a bit of a re-design, and with Gitlab, we've also shipped commenting, workspaces and teams. As for why we're working on this problem; we just wanted to use something fast, with minimal setup, and built-in views for Git. We just couldn't find anything designed from the ground up for development teams. Finally, Tara AI is free for teams and developers. Our free forever plan has no limits on users, tasks or workspaces. Looking forward, we're working on predictive functionality around effort estimation, release planning and engineering analytics. Thanks for reading!

ApolloRising 6y ago
Just signed up and so far everything worked well. Couple tweaks, you may want to use more than 1 letter for the workspace name icon in the left menu when a user has a few workspaces since naming is unpredictable. There is also a lot of whitespace between welcome username, and the getting started copy on the page. The home icon and the logo in the left nav do the same thing not sure if you need both. Create task in the backlog should stand out more, I'm a PM and that is probably one of the most used options. Is there an option to add time to a task or urgency? Hope this helps, looks like a great start.
- iba99 6y ago
  Hey! So we had the option for a min char count, but users wanted to have one letter workspaces (for fun I guess?). We need to revamp our navigation anyway since it's hard to know where to click to change workspaces. Good point on the whitespace- will take a look. As for creating tasks- we're thinking of a sticky area on the left (that's always on) to create tasks. For priority- we're releasing labels in 3 weeks. You should be able to assign #P1 or priority overall on different sets of tasks. That being said- we are considering adding some form of auto recognition or NLP to suggest priority and labels automatically based on past tasks. For time, we have 3 effort options (points, hours or days), we kept it simple to create a standup view where you can see how engineers track throughout the week. Let us know which other parts may be tedious. We have more work to do!
  - ApolloRising 6y ago
    Will do and good luck!
drcongo 6y ago
Can I be the first to ask _how_ it's free?
- freddier 6y ago
  The website mentions in the pricing popup: >We are working on functionality for teams that provides visibility and predictability in product development. Features may include automation around sprints and multi-team workflows. This will be part of our premium plan, and is where the AI comes into play. I've also been hurt by free tools that disappear after we commit to them but since Tara did AI stuff for PM in the past maybe they already have it in the roadmap.
  - drcongo 6y ago
    Thanks
dnsmichi 6y ago
Thanks for sharing. I'm curious about the GitLab integration, is there a page on your website describing it in more detail?
- iba99 6y ago
  Just made this live: https://help.tara.ai/hc/en-us/articles/360051704951-Gitlab-Integration https://help.tara.ai/hc/en-us/articles/360051704951-Gitlab-I... Basically, RN its a webhook. Once active, you can view merge requests related to a task, when synced. Over time, we should be releasing a full fledged Gitlab bi-directional sync and app (similar to our Github app here: https://github.com/marketplace/tara-ai https://github.com/marketplace/tara-ai) Our Github app also allows you to view stale PRs that are blocking the sprint. We should have similar functionality for Gitlab over the next few wks.
  - danudey 6y ago
    Is there a reason for announcing it now, when it's incomplete and less useful, rather than once it's done (or more feature complete, at least)? I ask because this seems like the sort of thing I would look at, then shrug off because it's not all there, as I don't want to put time and energy into learning a product that will have the features I want "some day", so I'd be likely to skip out on it for now and then forget about it basically forever. Personally, I'd much rather be shown something that feels "done" and try to integrate it then than work with someone's first pass on the implementation, and I'm concerned that others would feel the same way and you would miss out on users.
    - iba99 6y ago
      Solid point, but I would counter that a feature or a product is never truly complete. The goal should be to get to a stage where users can derive value from the feature (or product), and ship. In our case, the main ask from developers is the ability to sync/connect their tasks to merge requests on Gitlab. v1 of the integration does exactly that, and additional elements will be shipped over the coming weeks as users activate the integration.
loufe 6y ago
Any plans to accommodate privately-hosted git servers?
- iba99 6y ago
  Not yet but it would form part of a future on-prem version of Tara, where privately-hosted instances of Github/Gitlab are accommodated.
crdrost 6y ago
To set up my question, maybe I should share a sort of hazy crackpot vision or dream. So when I look at Git, I see a variety of postmodernism that's like “look, we’re not being pretentiously intellectual or even pessimistic—we’re being realistic, software just is a postmodern world, Alice and Bob both have software that they call ‘Linux’ on their laptops, and they just aren’t the same source code, but they are both Linux, and trying to assess which one is the “true” Linux really does devolve into asking questions about power and basically in this case the power is vested ultimately in one king, Linus Torvalds, who says which one is more modern, and that’s fine as long as you understand that it’s arbitrary and anyone can fork the project at any time and create a rival power-structure and so forth.” Like, these ideas that I made fun of when I was a kid turn out to be amazingly practical things as finally revealed by git enlightenment. I would summarize the problems of various bugtrackers including Jira as being insufficiently “up with the times” therefore. They reflect the old modernist approach to truth. Schedules, deadlines, when was this “done”. But we know in software that really you want your source of truth of your bugtracker to basically be in the same Git repository as your code: one and the same commit needs to simultaneously close a bug as needs to properly change the source code to fix that bug, because the bug may be fixed in your “staging” codebase but that bugfix may not yet be deployed to “prod.” A reversion merged into prod as a hotfix needs to suddenly re-open the bug that we said was fixed-in-prod because now it no longer is. All of that. That's my hazy crackpot vision. :) Given all that, there is also a great difficulty with people using workflows like GitFlow which have the same “old way of doing things” misunderstandings. It’s not that those workflows aren’t good, they are good—for SVN repositories. You apply them to a Git repository and then you have this strange tension where the workflow and the VCS are working at cross-purposes sometimes. So it's also things like GitLab's CI/CD being a file checked into Git. This sounds great until you realize that nobody is expecting postmodernism to suddenly pop up here. “How did you merge that thing into prod when all of our admins were unreachable? Admins are supposed to have to push the button.” “Well, I was really in a bind, so I did something I would have never normally done: I pushed up my own branch `fix-master`, and in that branch I changed the CI/CD file to trigger deploys to production on pushes to `fix-master` instead of `master`.” But I had to!” Git was like “hegemony? what hegemony? if `master` has power then everyone has power.” Hah. So my question is, based on this description, I am not sure that I see you have “drunk the same Kool-aid” about Git, I am instead seeing a declaration that you want something fast-and-easy-and-supports-Git. Which, like, is fine. I don’t want to come across as crapping on your invention with a dream that I absolutely admit is hazy and crackpot, right? You have actually done the work and I am hypothetical and I have mad respect for you and your work. But I am sharing kind of my bigger vision to ask, “do you have a bigger vision? is it different than mine, some more systematic structure?” Is Tara just an easy way to do something like Jira with Git, or do you have a fundamentally new concept in mind that you are headed towards that will change how we track issues with our software?
oxfordmale 6y ago
@iba99 If only company founders could be forced to pay for "free forever plan" once they are no longer free. In reality "Free for ever" seems to mean "free untill I sell the company"

by iba99 6y ago

ApolloRising 6y ago

Just signed up and so far everything worked well. Couple tweaks, you may want to use more than 1 letter for the workspace name icon in the left menu when a user has a few workspaces since naming is unpredictable. There is also a lot of whitespace between welcome username, and the getting started copy on the page. The home icon and the logo in the left nav do the same thing not sure if you need both. Create task in the backlog should stand out more, I'm a PM and that is probably one of the most used options. Is there an option to add time to a task or urgency? Hope this helps, looks like a great start.

iba99 6y ago
Hey! So we had the option for a min char count, but users wanted to have one letter workspaces (for fun I guess?). We need to revamp our navigation anyway since it's hard to know where to click to change workspaces. Good point on the whitespace- will take a look. As for creating tasks- we're thinking of a sticky area on the left (that's always on) to create tasks. For priority- we're releasing labels in 3 weeks. You should be able to assign #P1 or priority overall on different sets of tasks. That being said- we are considering adding some form of auto recognition or NLP to suggest priority and labels automatically based on past tasks. For time, we have 3 effort options (points, hours or days), we kept it simple to create a standup view where you can see how engineers track throughout the week. Let us know which other parts may be tedious. We have more work to do!
- ApolloRising 6y ago
  Will do and good luck!

drcongo 6y ago

Can I be the first to ask _how_ it's free?

freddier 6y ago
The website mentions in the pricing popup: >We are working on functionality for teams that provides visibility and predictability in product development. Features may include automation around sprints and multi-team workflows. This will be part of our premium plan, and is where the AI comes into play. I've also been hurt by free tools that disappear after we commit to them but since Tara did AI stuff for PM in the past maybe they already have it in the roadmap.
- drcongo 6y ago
  Thanks

dnsmichi 6y ago

Thanks for sharing. I'm curious about the GitLab integration, is there a page on your website describing it in more detail?

iba99 6y ago
Just made this live: https://help.tara.ai/hc/en-us/articles/360051704951-Gitlab-Integration https://help.tara.ai/hc/en-us/articles/360051704951-Gitlab-I... Basically, RN its a webhook. Once active, you can view merge requests related to a task, when synced. Over time, we should be releasing a full fledged Gitlab bi-directional sync and app (similar to our Github app here: https://github.com/marketplace/tara-ai https://github.com/marketplace/tara-ai) Our Github app also allows you to view stale PRs that are blocking the sprint. We should have similar functionality for Gitlab over the next few wks.
- danudey 6y ago
  Is there a reason for announcing it now, when it's incomplete and less useful, rather than once it's done (or more feature complete, at least)? I ask because this seems like the sort of thing I would look at, then shrug off because it's not all there, as I don't want to put time and energy into learning a product that will have the features I want "some day", so I'd be likely to skip out on it for now and then forget about it basically forever. Personally, I'd much rather be shown something that feels "done" and try to integrate it then than work with someone's first pass on the implementation, and I'm concerned that others would feel the same way and you would miss out on users.
  - iba99 6y ago
    Solid point, but I would counter that a feature or a product is never truly complete. The goal should be to get to a stage where users can derive value from the feature (or product), and ship. In our case, the main ask from developers is the ability to sync/connect their tasks to merge requests on Gitlab. v1 of the integration does exactly that, and additional elements will be shipped over the coming weeks as users activate the integration.

loufe 6y ago

Any plans to accommodate privately-hosted git servers?

iba99 6y ago
Not yet but it would form part of a future on-prem version of Tara, where privately-hosted instances of Github/Gitlab are accommodated.

crdrost 6y ago

To set up my question, maybe I should share a sort of hazy crackpot vision or dream. So when I look at Git, I see a variety of postmodernism that's like “look, we’re not being pretentiously intellectual or even pessimistic—we’re being realistic, software just is a postmodern world, Alice and Bob both have software that they call ‘Linux’ on their laptops, and they just aren’t the same source code, but they are both Linux, and trying to assess which one is the “true” Linux really does devolve into asking questions about power and basically in this case the power is vested ultimately in one king, Linus Torvalds, who says which one is more modern, and that’s fine as long as you understand that it’s arbitrary and anyone can fork the project at any time and create a rival power-structure and so forth.” Like, these ideas that I made fun of when I was a kid turn out to be amazingly practical things as finally revealed by git enlightenment. I would summarize the problems of various bugtrackers including Jira as being insufficiently “up with the times” therefore. They reflect the old modernist approach to truth. Schedules, deadlines, when was this “done”. But we know in software that really you want your source of truth of your bugtracker to basically be in the same Git repository as your code: one and the same commit needs to simultaneously close a bug as needs to properly change the source code to fix that bug, because the bug may be fixed in your “staging” codebase but that bugfix may not yet be deployed to “prod.” A reversion merged into prod as a hotfix needs to suddenly re-open the bug that we said was fixed-in-prod because now it no longer is. All of that. That's my hazy crackpot vision. :) Given all that, there is also a great difficulty with people using workflows like GitFlow which have the same “old way of doing things” misunderstandings. It’s not that those workflows aren’t good, they are good—for SVN repositories. You apply them to a Git repository and then you have this strange tension where the workflow and the VCS are working at cross-purposes sometimes. So it's also things like GitLab's CI/CD being a file checked into Git. This sounds great until you realize that nobody is expecting postmodernism to suddenly pop up here. “How did you merge that thing into prod when all of our admins were unreachable? Admins are supposed to have to push the button.” “Well, I was really in a bind, so I did something I would have never normally done: I pushed up my own branch `fix-master`, and in that branch I changed the CI/CD file to trigger deploys to production on pushes to `fix-master` instead of `master`.” But I had to!” Git was like “hegemony? what hegemony? if `master` has power then everyone has power.” Hah. So my question is, based on this description, I am not sure that I see you have “drunk the same Kool-aid” about Git, I am instead seeing a declaration that you want something fast-and-easy-and-supports-Git. Which, like, is fine. I don’t want to come across as crapping on your invention with a dream that I absolutely admit is hazy and crackpot, right? You have actually done the work and I am hypothetical and I have mad respect for you and your work. But I am sharing kind of my bigger vision to ask, “do you have a bigger vision? is it different than mine, some more systematic structure?” Is Tara just an easy way to do something like Jira with Git, or do you have a fundamentally new concept in mind that you are headed towards that will change how we track issues with our software?

oxfordmale 6y ago

@iba99 If only company founders could be forced to pay for "free forever plan" once they are no longer free. In reality "Free for ever" seems to mean "free untill I sell the company"