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Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage projects as a solo dev?

2 points by nbbaier ↗ HN
I'm interested in what tools people use to manage their projects as solo developers. Both professional solo projects and just side, fun projects.

EDIT: For clarification, by "manage projects" I mean managing the all the metadata related to tasks, bugs, todos, features, deadlines, milestones, etc.

8 comments

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OhMeadhbh
So... by "manage projects" you mean all the metadata related to tasks, bugs, todos, features, deadlines and milestones? (I've heard some people use "manage projects" to mean "how do I build the source? make? cmake? etc.")

To be honest, I just save all that stuff in text files in the same repo as the code (though usually in a specific directory at the root of the project.) I have some tools that pull meta-data out of text files so I can query them for things like "give me a list of open items" or "give me a list of items tagged with a specific release target."

It takes some getting used to if you like HTML interfaces, but I grew up on the command line so it works for me.

nbbaier
> So... by "manage projects" you mean all the metadata related to tasks, bugs, todos, features, deadlines and milestones?

Yeah this is what I mean.

> To be honest, I just save all that stuff in text files in the same repo as the code (though usually in a specific directory at the root of the project.) I have some tools that pull meta-data out of text files so I can query them for things like "give me a list of open items" or "give me a list of items tagged with a specific release target."

I love the idea of managing stuff in plain text, will have to try something like this out. Do you have the code up anywhere?

OhMeadhbh
Honestly, you're the first person who hasn't recoiled in horror when I explained it. The code I have is very janky. It works about 90% the time and the other 90% of the time I revert to using grep from the command line. I'll document the doc standards I'm using somewhere and then try to fix the code.

The other thing I'm working on is figuring out git plumbing so I can force the ~/todo or ~/project directory in a repo to be the same in all branches (that way you can update them no matter what branch you're on.)

nbbaier
> Honestly, you're the first person who hasn't recoiled in horror when I explained it.

This surprises me, I feel like I see so many people talking about plain text notes !

mubou
File explorer. I put them in separate folders so their files aren't all jumbled together /s

Can you clarify what you mean by "manage projects"? If you mean issue tracking / notes, I sometimes use github issues, but most often I simply use a markdown file in the gitignored directory where I keep assets that shouldn't be checked in (psds, db backups, and so on). The mermaid extension for vscode makes it easy to throw together flowcharts in that same file. Sometimes I use google tasks for checklists, since my other todo's are in there too.

PaulHoule
Mostly paper kanban boards. From time to time I tear down the old one and make a new one. I broke mine down into two sheets in order of long-term vs short-term speculativeness then wrote some overflow ideas onto a third sheet.

Paper is my ‘killer app’ when I am having any difficulty with a project. The last thing I need is another window on my virtual desktops to navigate to, if I want to knock down tasks like a beast I print them down and cross them out.

mmarian
Everything is in Notion for me.