sovietmudkipz

Sidebar topic: (analog or digital) Work Tracking Systems for solo/tiny team sizes.

Central Question: What pragmatic work tracking advice do people have for tiny (1-4; 1 founder, 1-3 contractors) team sizes, analog or digital?

Context: I noticed a source of friction for my larger solo projects (1+ months) was a lack of structure and carrying the entire project in my head. Effective for hackathons but life is starting to force me into more context switching (getting older I guess). I've already refactored my work system to involve an analog weekly planner + weekly retro/plan ritual, heavier emphasis on digital calendar, adopting a two phase work philosophy (planning/grooming, task execution) often facilitated by pomodoro (5 minutes plan, 25 execute), and leaning on having a digital work tracking system.

I've taken a large bet on GitHub's ecosystem. Issues + "type:" labels let me create ticket types (spike, feature, bug) + "area:" labels (e.g. runtimes, category of concern (security, REST, client, ...), ...) allows me to gather and tag appropriate units of work. GitHub projects supports kanban boards and "filter by" or "slice by" features that are helpful. Pull Requests + Actions let me vet software additions. Issue/PR comment streams allow additional context capturing. Milestones & Releases let me plan larger epics and bundle my software. It's a robust digital system whose mental model makes sense in the context of delivering software.

I have an ambitious software project idea (multiplayer game software) that I'll eventually want to bring in a contractor or more. I want to stipulate some degree of interfacing with my system, even if it's just to capture the high level "this feature is handled by contractor A" and allow delegated delivery.

The points of friction so far have come from wrestling decision control with ai agents, and resisting the temptation to plan in too much detail too far into the future.

Given that brain dump, what advice might you have for me to help make for successful?

Programmer work product (typically) benefits the capital class, directly via product engineering or indirectly via platform engineering.

If the aspiration of a 10x or more programmer is enabled through AI then the capital class win, in the typical case. Software eats the world.

I cannot describe how disappointing it is to be switching to this insane time limit window based pricing. I absolutely abhor that I'll be subjected to 5 hour chunks of time where I'll be limited at some point in that window of time, and be told I'll have to wait. And then there is a weekly limit.

That's not how my creative energy works. I have time that I want to solve problems, and I want to solve them. I don't want a cooldown timer applied to solving a problem. Not to mention the anxiety of realizing that while I sleep I could have burned tokens in that time.

I'm incredibly disappointed when I sat down to my hobbyist programming time and realized copilot was suddenly and dramatically changed in a way that is incredibly disheartening.

Meter my token usage DON'T tell me when I can use them! ARGH.

Ahhhh yes thank you for this link! I'm working on a project and my agent referred me to the factbook. It said all this great savory information was made available on the factbook website. I thought great but when I went to check it was all very basic. Truly I thought my agent was hallucinating!

It wasn't! Note to self: also check archive.org in case there is an internet archive for any sites an agent might reference.

I checked out this repo -- it has the information useful to my project. Thanks for sharing this!

I wonder if this will wind up being true. Yes it’s cheaper to produce an app but most normies I know don’t really want to produce an app. No instead they want to consume a curated app. If anything we’ve moved the value proposition from “it exists” to “it exists and is good, especially compared to the competition.”

App creators will be competing and copying each other. The software that can support change will probably win in the market. Probably…?

Perfect…! I’ll check out Alex Rome.

Sounds like you’re ahead of me then! The game I’m working on off & on is a 32v32 moba. I want the gameplay of Heroes of the Storm but with the match size of a battlefield server.

I wish I could dedicate myself full time to the effort (and in fact I’m working with my financial planner to figure out a plan) but this is a side project that is prioritized behind a few things. I wouldn’t feel too comfortable collaborating right now since I would be unpredictable. I’ll keep you in mind for when that changes though!

Investigating…

Good point w/ journaling and maybe even preparing stuff to share. Right now it feels like trying to eat a whale whole. …That’s the beauty of doing something in a new (to me) domain though. Even if I don’t share, the practice of formulating how I would explain to someone is beneficial.

Hi! I recently (2 weeks) chose this software to invest time into in order to make music/sfx for video games. Do you personally use this software to create music yourself? Just curious!

Hobbyist game dev here. Getting into audio and music effects has been fun but I constantly feel overwhelmed. I chose Ardour as my DAW (digital audio workstation) and have been excitedly working on learning. I also bought the book “ Writing Interactive Music for Video Games: A Composer's Guide” which has been very helpful at understanding high level vocabulary.

It’s a lot of work. I slightly enjoy it but boooooy is getting into audio and music pretty challenging. It’ll be good if I ever need to know what I’m talking about when working with others… in the future where I can dedicate myself full time to game dev… One day one day…

I don’t really have a point here. If anyone has any resources, tips, or recommendations on this subject let me know.

Edit: Congrats on the new 9.0 release!

I remember when Ubuntu decided to reroute apt installations into SNAP installs. So you install a package via apt and there was logic to see if they should disregard your command and install a SNAP instead. Do they still do that?

It annoyed me so much that I switched to mint.

Why wait so long? Do it now…

This is the same company who creates internal systems that encourage wringing out every drop of effort no matter how many piss bottles litter their work environment. When a faceless program uses gamification and comparison estimations to keep their employed serfs always working, constantly fed a sense of being behind. The stress of it all without the minimal of a “good job!”

You’re telling me THAT style of company isn’t capable of achieving this goal for another 2 months? If the company is going to use reprehensible practices at least use it to achieve good quicker.

To me this feels like releasing a press announcement to generate good PR and waiting until everyone forgets before not actually doing the thing… That’s my cynical take.