8 ms·

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

96 points by okovooo 6mo ago

okovooo 6mo 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 6mo ago
  A decent tool could surely define multiple different views of the same information?
  - wpietri 6mo ago
    It could in theory, but purchasing decisions for tools like these are generally made by managers or executives, so they end up being optimized for what those people want. Or, more accurately, what they think they want.
  - dankons 6mo ago
    Plugging the same linear.app mentioned in a different comment -- switched a couple years ago (small team, fed up with general slowness and jank of Jira) and don't want to look back.
  - bonesss 6mo ago
    [Not affiliated:] I have used JetBrains YouTrack in a number of scenarios for that specific ability, multiple simultaneous views/boards for various stakeholders and production pipelines (multi-org and multi-project). I’d give it an independent recommendation in general, too, as the scripting/querying/commands make many tasks simple. You can tell it was built by programmers for programming project management, in the good way.
  - globular-toast 6mo ago
    I got really frustrated with Jira in my company. Getting rid of it completely would have been too lofty a goal, so I looked into how they were using it. Turns out they were mostly just using it wrong. You can have multiple "views" of the same info. I ended up fixing the boards and it mostly works now. It's still crap for various reasons and massively bloated, of course.
  - okovooo 6mo ago
    Let's say. But is it good for the team? At a daily meeting, the manager shows the screen of his board and I don't understand where my tasks are on it. I've made personal filters for myself, but it's always difficult to navigate quickly in a meeting when it comes to my field of work
- tarr1124 6mo ago
  [dead]
dvh 6mo 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.
- alemwjsl 6mo ago
  It also looks like Jira.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 6mo 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 6mo 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.
    - piva00 6mo ago
      A system that does too much is complex almost by definition, with complexity you introduce conflicts between features that need to be resolved through design, designing for multiple interactions of conflicting features is neigh impossible. The combinatorial of interactions between many features will inevitably create unresolvable edge-cases that need to be patched over, either hidden away or by tacking on more complexity so the user can control how these edge-cases should be solved for their own workflow. There is no way to do such design upfront, you can only upfront what you can think and reason about. That's how all projects start, and their demise is exactly from realising "oh, we don't cover this flow, maybe we should have a feature for that". Taking all these learnings and applying to a new system that has more design upfront starts to verge on Second System problem. Linux is also full of cruft, it's good enough but I don't think you should live with the impression that is a benchmark of software quality. It's still impressive but as any complex system it has many issues from legacy.
eterm 6mo 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?
- okovooo 6mo ago
  Trello does not work in Russia. You cannot install it on your server in the company's closed loop. There is no task number, there are no subtasks, you cannot see the progress of subtasks on the parent's board. There is no analytics. There is no page where you can view all the tasks that can be taken on. The service does not claim the laurels of solving all problems, but it is unique in its own way.
TipsForCanoes 6mo ago
Can you show the capacity and flow management parts?
- okovooo 6mo ago
  The limit can be specified per board (process). This is my vision of an electronic kanban board. Perhaps in the future I will add an indication to the columns, but now I want to check my guesses.
zeafoamrun 6mo 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 https://www.kanbanchaos.com so it can act as a frontend for our actual task tracker. Full taskception
- AFF87 6mo ago
  "No sprints were completed in the making of this game." Loving this. And the fact your wife also sells socks as merch of the game!
ketzu 6mo 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 6mo 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.
- wpietri 6mo ago
  This is such an important lesson. To me so many things from the "agile" toolkit appear to fail in ways where people tend to blame the tools, but instead are exposing people/process problems. The intent was that organizations use the pain points to improve process and solve problems. But in my experience a lot of organizations would rather remain dysfunctional than work effectively, and so will then shift to tools that don't expose the problems.
- vjvjvjvjghv 6mo ago
  That’s one thing I hate at my company . Many teams run Jira with backlogs, burndowns and whatever. In theory all the info is right there. But the big guys can’t be bothered to use Jira so somebody has to spend hours and hours prepping PowerPoint slides with the info that’s in Jira.
- grvdrm 6mo ago
  Not just boards. I’ll argue any deliverable. Part of what makes corp life so inefficient is that lack of unified approach. Working with a company where many of C-suite folks operate in normal corp world: Office 365. Slides, spreadsheets, the currency of business. Meanwhile the product team operates in JIRA and in Confluence. They communicate with each other in their respective preferred formats. But imagine if CEO said something like: any deliverable of A,B,C types has to be Confluence. No exceptions. 3 strikes until you get a penalty. Would that help?
Stevvo 6mo 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.
- okovooo 6mo ago
  Using vibe coding, you will not be able to do such a service in such a short time. In addition to the goal of researching my kanban vision, I also experimented with an architecture that allowed me to achieve the required productivity and ease of development. AI is not that cool yet
goopthink 6mo ago
“I spent 6 years building my Kanban as I hated how managers run the boards”… only to discover that problem was the managers and workflows designed for their legibility (not engineers), not the technology or software itself, and that the tech itself could be rebuilt in a weekend nowadays?
- orphereus 6mo ago
  The amount of comments shilling LLMs on HN is skyrocketing. Could be a recession indicator?
  - stagezerowil 6mo ago
    I don't think people are "shilling" LLMs. They are new tools that are exciting.
  - pylotlight 6mo ago
    Hey everyone, look at the luddite.
  - peacebeard 6mo ago
    They weren’t shilling at all, it was a passive statement of fact. In fact, they didn’t mention LLMs at all and a kanban board could be built in a weekend without one so it’s not even clear if your comment is on topic
maxloh 6mo 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 6mo ago
  It's source-available proprietary software that happens to be distributed through NPM.
  - oefrha 6mo ago
    It's not source available, there's only bundled minified code looking like https://unpkg.com/ooko@0.121.0/static/js/main..js https://unpkg.com/ooko@0.121.0/static/js/main..js If this is source available then every website is source available.
    - reactordev 6mo ago
      But every website is source available. How else would you render it? Streaming PNGs?
    - efilife 6mo ago
      Am I crazy or is this not minified, but obfuscated to hide what the code does? Can't test right now
      - okovooo 6mo ago
        This is a minified code.
- okovooo 6mo ago
  I can't afford a free license. I have no sponsors and have been unemployed for a year. It's rare for a free-source project to succeed, so I decided not to use a free license initially.
jaffa2 6mo 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
- okovooo 6mo ago
  Your comment was the first, but it's the hardest to answer. I started doing this project when a new manager joined the team. And his first decision was to change the processes by rebuilding the kanban board. The team as a whole was initially satisfied with the board, which had been built for a long time with the previous two managers. Everyone began to propose their requirements for the kanban board, but the new manager did not hesitate to do as he saw fit. And in the future, this story was repeated with new managers. If you take into account all the wishes, then the board becomes very large, both in width and in height. That's why I don't criticize new managers. In many ways, this is a consequence of the tracker's functionality. Different types of work have different stages. For example, a developer needs a "code review" column, someone needs an additional "approval" column, etc. My idea was to give each type of work its own board. And on the task card, display which subtasks are currently being worked on. As a result, we would have unloaded the main kanban board, and the kanban boards for work tasks would have become more flexible. It also provides new opportunities for analytics. Or here is the flexibility in creating tasks, for example, add an "analytics" task at the testing stage. For me, ooko is an experiment with a hierarchy of tasks, so what the pros or cons are remains to be seen. Something like that
_the_inflator 6mo 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.
dizhn 6mo 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?")
pif 6mo 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.
subwatch_dev 6mo 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?
- okovooo 6mo ago
  It takes most of the time to decide what to do next. I don't have so much energy and desire to do anything to try to do everything. The main way of promotion is advertising in search results. For me, it is the most effective and affordable in terms of quality for new users.
mfgadv99 6mo ago
[flagged]
helloplanets 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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?
    - okovooo 6mo ago
      you can run it in a virtual machine. All the code is written in javascript, and you can study it without even decompiling it.
      - explodes 6mo ago
        Virtual machines don't prevent data exfiltration. Auditing code before using it does. I'm with GP. I was going to use this for personal use until I noticed this problem.
        okovooo 6mo ago
        What is a GP? I'm not a lawyer, so I wrote the license as best I could. If decompilation is needed only for auditing, then I have no objections, you can do it.
esperent 6mo ago
Is there a username and password for the demo?
- okovooo 6mo ago
  Yes, registration is required. This is both a demo and a working service that is used by a dozen teams.
  - esperent 6mo ago
    So it's not a demo then. It would help a lot of you added an actual demo. Or simply changed the wording to say "make a free account here to test it".
    - okovooo 6mo ago
      Perhaps you're right and it's worth changing the wording. But those users who are not ready to register will not follow the link and I will not find out about them. And those who are ready will not pay attention to the wording of the link.
reactordev 6mo ago
Claude could zero-shot this.
_s_a_m_ 6mo ago
Channeling Stroustrup: there are two types of project management tools, the ones everyone complains about and the ones nobody uses.
- IshKebab 6mo ago
  Yeah that's one of those quotes that has done more harm than good. It's roughly equivalent to the fallacy of the grey - some things are crap so everything is equally crap. In reality nobody (sane) would claim that Bugzilla is better than Phabricator for example. Some project management tools are better than others.
  - _false 6mo ago
    at least bugzilla is actively maintained. Abandonware over something Mozilla, Red Hat, Apache, GNOME, and KDE still run production workflows on isn't an obviously sane choice
    - IshKebab 6mo ago
      Phabricator is maintained - it's just a community project called Phorge now.
  - jjmarr 6mo ago
    He's right, though. C++ exists because it was compatible with C code. Not having to rewrite into Java was a major advantage and justifies most of the terrible design decisions made as a result.
    - IshKebab 6mo ago
      Interesting, I think you're interpreting the quote in a different way to me. It it "People complain about C++ and not Foo because even though Foo is better, C++ had to be crap in order for people to use it." Or "People complain about C++ and not Foo because although they are equally crap, nobody uses Foo so there's nobody to complain about it." I always thought it was the latter. Unfortunately I can't find much more on where he actually said this than his own quotes page which also doesn't really clarify anything: https://www.stroustrup.com/quotes.html https://www.stroustrup.com/quotes.html
ZpJuUuNaQ5 6mo ago
1. "Hated how managers run boards", but there is absolutely no explanation on what this system does differently. How does it differ from the myriad of existing solutions? 2. Documentation is practically non-existent. 3. The code isn't event open-source, and the license prohibits modification and distribution. Come on, this is essentially a TODO app. 4. Demo requires a user to create a real account and use an email address... 5. Telegram channel appears to have some demo videos, but all posts are in Russian. Why? I would say this is some sort of joke if I weren't familiar with this kind of mindset, but I don't understand what causes this.
- okovooo 6mo ago
  I do the service alone in my free time. Documentation is my weak side, it takes time, desire and understanding of what should be there. I am from Russia and most of the users of the service are from Russia. This is the first time that so many non-Russian speaking users have signed up for ooko. Telegram has translation functionality, if anything.
- mjburgess 6mo ago
  Inability to see that the perceived difficulty in using a system is due to your own mismatched mental-model/needs/scenario -- so inventing one which is overfit to your own needs/model at this specific moment, which fails to generalise and is eventually adapted overtime to more scenarios and becomes frustrating again. The cause is lack of self-awareness.
wpietri 6mo ago
I think not having much documentation is fine, but please make the demo something where people can use it without logging in. E.g., they can click a button and just start messing with a demo project. Then you regularly reap the demo projects that haven't been used in the last 48 hours.
- okovooo 6mo ago
  ooko.pro It's not just a demo, it's a working service and a lot of people use it every day. The presence of registration is both a necessity and a kind of barrier from disinterested users.
  - wpietri 6mo ago
    It's also a barrier to interested users. I'm one. I am currently using 3 kanban solutions for different needs. I'm always looking for better solutions, but I'm not going to invest much in something with no docs and one screenshot. That said, your answer here tells me what I need to know about the product.
kojeovo 6mo ago
looks like it can be vibe coded in 6 hours tbh
- pylotlight 6mo ago
  I was thinking same thing, very confused on how 'simple kanban 2000' takes 6 years?
  - dijit 6mo ago
    Simple things are usually hard to make in reality.
firemelt 6mo ago
why?
ctmnt 6mo ago
Man I miss Tracker.
- okovooo 6mo ago
  Yes

96 points by okovooo 6mo 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 6mo ago
A decent tool could surely define multiple different views of the same information?
- wpietri 6mo ago
  It could in theory, but purchasing decisions for tools like these are generally made by managers or executives, so they end up being optimized for what those people want. Or, more accurately, what they think they want.
- dankons 6mo ago
  Plugging the same linear.app mentioned in a different comment -- switched a couple years ago (small team, fed up with general slowness and jank of Jira) and don't want to look back.
- bonesss 6mo ago
  [Not affiliated:] I have used JetBrains YouTrack in a number of scenarios for that specific ability, multiple simultaneous views/boards for various stakeholders and production pipelines (multi-org and multi-project). I’d give it an independent recommendation in general, too, as the scripting/querying/commands make many tasks simple. You can tell it was built by programmers for programming project management, in the good way.
- globular-toast 6mo ago
  I got really frustrated with Jira in my company. Getting rid of it completely would have been too lofty a goal, so I looked into how they were using it. Turns out they were mostly just using it wrong. You can have multiple "views" of the same info. I ended up fixing the boards and it mostly works now. It's still crap for various reasons and massively bloated, of course.
- okovooo 6mo ago
  Let's say. But is it good for the team? At a daily meeting, the manager shows the screen of his board and I don't understand where my tasks are on it. I've made personal filters for myself, but it's always difficult to navigate quickly in a meeting when it comes to my field of work
tarr1124 6mo ago
[dead]

dvh 6mo 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.

alemwjsl 6mo ago
It also looks like Jira.
SOLAR_FIELDS 6mo 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 6mo 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.
  - piva00 6mo ago
    A system that does too much is complex almost by definition, with complexity you introduce conflicts between features that need to be resolved through design, designing for multiple interactions of conflicting features is neigh impossible. The combinatorial of interactions between many features will inevitably create unresolvable edge-cases that need to be patched over, either hidden away or by tacking on more complexity so the user can control how these edge-cases should be solved for their own workflow. There is no way to do such design upfront, you can only upfront what you can think and reason about. That's how all projects start, and their demise is exactly from realising "oh, we don't cover this flow, maybe we should have a feature for that". Taking all these learnings and applying to a new system that has more design upfront starts to verge on Second System problem. Linux is also full of cruft, it's good enough but I don't think you should live with the impression that is a benchmark of software quality. It's still impressive but as any complex system it has many issues from legacy.

eterm 6mo 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?

okovooo 6mo ago
Trello does not work in Russia. You cannot install it on your server in the company's closed loop. There is no task number, there are no subtasks, you cannot see the progress of subtasks on the parent's board. There is no analytics. There is no page where you can view all the tasks that can be taken on. The service does not claim the laurels of solving all problems, but it is unique in its own way.

TipsForCanoes 6mo ago

Can you show the capacity and flow management parts?

okovooo 6mo ago
The limit can be specified per board (process). This is my vision of an electronic kanban board. Perhaps in the future I will add an indication to the columns, but now I want to check my guesses.

zeafoamrun 6mo 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 https://www.kanbanchaos.com so it can act as a frontend for our actual task tracker. Full taskception

AFF87 6mo ago
"No sprints were completed in the making of this game." Loving this. And the fact your wife also sells socks as merch of the game!

ketzu 6mo 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 6mo 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.
wpietri 6mo ago
This is such an important lesson. To me so many things from the "agile" toolkit appear to fail in ways where people tend to blame the tools, but instead are exposing people/process problems. The intent was that organizations use the pain points to improve process and solve problems. But in my experience a lot of organizations would rather remain dysfunctional than work effectively, and so will then shift to tools that don't expose the problems.
vjvjvjvjghv 6mo ago
That’s one thing I hate at my company . Many teams run Jira with backlogs, burndowns and whatever. In theory all the info is right there. But the big guys can’t be bothered to use Jira so somebody has to spend hours and hours prepping PowerPoint slides with the info that’s in Jira.
grvdrm 6mo ago
Not just boards. I’ll argue any deliverable. Part of what makes corp life so inefficient is that lack of unified approach. Working with a company where many of C-suite folks operate in normal corp world: Office 365. Slides, spreadsheets, the currency of business. Meanwhile the product team operates in JIRA and in Confluence. They communicate with each other in their respective preferred formats. But imagine if CEO said something like: any deliverable of A,B,C types has to be Confluence. No exceptions. 3 strikes until you get a penalty. Would that help?

Stevvo 6mo 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.

okovooo 6mo ago
Using vibe coding, you will not be able to do such a service in such a short time. In addition to the goal of researching my kanban vision, I also experimented with an architecture that allowed me to achieve the required productivity and ease of development. AI is not that cool yet

goopthink 6mo ago

“I spent 6 years building my Kanban as I hated how managers run the boards”… only to discover that problem was the managers and workflows designed for their legibility (not engineers), not the technology or software itself, and that the tech itself could be rebuilt in a weekend nowadays?

orphereus 6mo ago
The amount of comments shilling LLMs on HN is skyrocketing. Could be a recession indicator?
- stagezerowil 6mo ago
  I don't think people are "shilling" LLMs. They are new tools that are exciting.
- pylotlight 6mo ago
  Hey everyone, look at the luddite.
- peacebeard 6mo ago
  They weren’t shilling at all, it was a passive statement of fact. In fact, they didn’t mention LLMs at all and a kanban board could be built in a weekend without one so it’s not even clear if your comment is on topic

maxloh 6mo 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 6mo ago
It's source-available proprietary software that happens to be distributed through NPM.
- oefrha 6mo ago
  It's not source available, there's only bundled minified code looking like https://unpkg.com/ooko@0.121.0/static/js/main..js https://unpkg.com/ooko@0.121.0/static/js/main..js If this is source available then every website is source available.
  - reactordev 6mo ago
    But every website is source available. How else would you render it? Streaming PNGs?
  - efilife 6mo ago
    Am I crazy or is this not minified, but obfuscated to hide what the code does? Can't test right now
    - okovooo 6mo ago
      This is a minified code.
okovooo 6mo ago
I can't afford a free license. I have no sponsors and have been unemployed for a year. It's rare for a free-source project to succeed, so I decided not to use a free license initially.

jaffa2 6mo 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

okovooo 6mo ago
Your comment was the first, but it's the hardest to answer. I started doing this project when a new manager joined the team. And his first decision was to change the processes by rebuilding the kanban board. The team as a whole was initially satisfied with the board, which had been built for a long time with the previous two managers. Everyone began to propose their requirements for the kanban board, but the new manager did not hesitate to do as he saw fit. And in the future, this story was repeated with new managers. If you take into account all the wishes, then the board becomes very large, both in width and in height. That's why I don't criticize new managers. In many ways, this is a consequence of the tracker's functionality. Different types of work have different stages. For example, a developer needs a "code review" column, someone needs an additional "approval" column, etc. My idea was to give each type of work its own board. And on the task card, display which subtasks are currently being worked on. As a result, we would have unloaded the main kanban board, and the kanban boards for work tasks would have become more flexible. It also provides new opportunities for analytics. Or here is the flexibility in creating tasks, for example, add an "analytics" task at the testing stage. For me, ooko is an experiment with a hierarchy of tasks, so what the pros or cons are remains to be seen. Something like that

_the_inflator 6mo 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.

dizhn 6mo 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?")

pif 6mo 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.

subwatch_dev 6mo 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?

okovooo 6mo ago
It takes most of the time to decide what to do next. I don't have so much energy and desire to do anything to try to do everything. The main way of promotion is advertising in search results. For me, it is the most effective and affordable in terms of quality for new users.

mfgadv99 6mo ago

[flagged]

helloplanets 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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?
  - okovooo 6mo ago
    you can run it in a virtual machine. All the code is written in javascript, and you can study it without even decompiling it.
    - explodes 6mo ago
      Virtual machines don't prevent data exfiltration. Auditing code before using it does. I'm with GP. I was going to use this for personal use until I noticed this problem.
      - okovooo 6mo ago
        What is a GP? I'm not a lawyer, so I wrote the license as best I could. If decompilation is needed only for auditing, then I have no objections, you can do it.

esperent 6mo ago

Is there a username and password for the demo?

okovooo 6mo ago
Yes, registration is required. This is both a demo and a working service that is used by a dozen teams.
- esperent 6mo ago
  So it's not a demo then. It would help a lot of you added an actual demo. Or simply changed the wording to say "make a free account here to test it".
  - okovooo 6mo ago
    Perhaps you're right and it's worth changing the wording. But those users who are not ready to register will not follow the link and I will not find out about them. And those who are ready will not pay attention to the wording of the link.

reactordev 6mo ago

Claude could zero-shot this.

_s_a_m_ 6mo ago

Channeling Stroustrup: there are two types of project management tools, the ones everyone complains about and the ones nobody uses.

IshKebab 6mo ago
Yeah that's one of those quotes that has done more harm than good. It's roughly equivalent to the fallacy of the grey - some things are crap so everything is equally crap. In reality nobody (sane) would claim that Bugzilla is better than Phabricator for example. Some project management tools are better than others.
- _false 6mo ago
  at least bugzilla is actively maintained. Abandonware over something Mozilla, Red Hat, Apache, GNOME, and KDE still run production workflows on isn't an obviously sane choice
  - IshKebab 6mo ago
    Phabricator is maintained - it's just a community project called Phorge now.
- jjmarr 6mo ago
  He's right, though. C++ exists because it was compatible with C code. Not having to rewrite into Java was a major advantage and justifies most of the terrible design decisions made as a result.
  - IshKebab 6mo ago
    Interesting, I think you're interpreting the quote in a different way to me. It it "People complain about C++ and not Foo because even though Foo is better, C++ had to be crap in order for people to use it." Or "People complain about C++ and not Foo because although they are equally crap, nobody uses Foo so there's nobody to complain about it." I always thought it was the latter. Unfortunately I can't find much more on where he actually said this than his own quotes page which also doesn't really clarify anything: https://www.stroustrup.com/quotes.html https://www.stroustrup.com/quotes.html

ZpJuUuNaQ5 6mo ago

1. "Hated how managers run boards", but there is absolutely no explanation on what this system does differently. How does it differ from the myriad of existing solutions? 2. Documentation is practically non-existent. 3. The code isn't event open-source, and the license prohibits modification and distribution. Come on, this is essentially a TODO app. 4. Demo requires a user to create a real account and use an email address... 5. Telegram channel appears to have some demo videos, but all posts are in Russian. Why? I would say this is some sort of joke if I weren't familiar with this kind of mindset, but I don't understand what causes this.

okovooo 6mo ago
I do the service alone in my free time. Documentation is my weak side, it takes time, desire and understanding of what should be there. I am from Russia and most of the users of the service are from Russia. This is the first time that so many non-Russian speaking users have signed up for ooko. Telegram has translation functionality, if anything.
mjburgess 6mo ago
Inability to see that the perceived difficulty in using a system is due to your own mismatched mental-model/needs/scenario -- so inventing one which is overfit to your own needs/model at this specific moment, which fails to generalise and is eventually adapted overtime to more scenarios and becomes frustrating again. The cause is lack of self-awareness.

wpietri 6mo ago

I think not having much documentation is fine, but please make the demo something where people can use it without logging in. E.g., they can click a button and just start messing with a demo project. Then you regularly reap the demo projects that haven't been used in the last 48 hours.

okovooo 6mo ago
ooko.pro It's not just a demo, it's a working service and a lot of people use it every day. The presence of registration is both a necessity and a kind of barrier from disinterested users.
- wpietri 6mo ago
  It's also a barrier to interested users. I'm one. I am currently using 3 kanban solutions for different needs. I'm always looking for better solutions, but I'm not going to invest much in something with no docs and one screenshot. That said, your answer here tells me what I need to know about the product.

kojeovo 6mo ago

looks like it can be vibe coded in 6 hours tbh

pylotlight 6mo ago
I was thinking same thing, very confused on how 'simple kanban 2000' takes 6 years?
- dijit 6mo ago
  Simple things are usually hard to make in reality.

firemelt 6mo ago

why?

ctmnt 6mo ago

Man I miss Tracker.

okovooo 6mo ago
Yes