The Mantra of Done
Over the years I've been developing software. I've seen all sorts of things that attempt to manage what you are doing, and how to improve that workflow. There are lots of apps for both GTK+ and Qt, as well as Windows and Mac OS, to try and help with this. There are lots of interesting web services too. I've even used a couple, particularly landing on SlimTimer for contract work I was doing in the past, as it has some particularly nice reporting features, and a simple REST API for connecting to it. However, even then, I felt there were several things which I would improve on.
A couple weeks ago, I was in Orlando, sprinting with some of the other members of my team at Canonical. One day, Elliot pointed out a particularly interesting blog entry, titled The Cult of Done Manifesto. The great thing about it, is that it all makes sense, and is yet rather simple. It's also not a finite set, and doesn't necessarily apply to all fields of practice. I would say that for example, item #9 in the list, doesn't really fit well into the politial arena.
Back to all the apps though. I was thinking about the Cult of Done again, and the very simplified task manager app I'd started writing, that was to just be a client for SlimTimer, after being asked for comments on a couple of icons for Getting Things Gnome, a GTK+ task manager based on Getting Things Done. Looking at its screenshots, I was amazed at just how complex it really was. Even all the miriad of OS X apps for GTD seem to be too complex, and don't really integrate well with the rest of the system. Most importantly, all these apps seem to targetting a specific workflow, and concentrating on what needs to be done, rather than the actual point of them being done.
So back to Stopwatch. Last night I set up a project on Launchpad for it, and will be moving the code I do have for it already, over to bzr. But it will no longer only be a SlimTimer client. Rather instead, it will be a very simple, yet extensible, task manager, which integrates better with the rest of the system. The most interesting thing to do with it, I have in my mind right now, is a backend to handle trackable and taskable items on Launchpad. It will be so nice to have all my assigned bugs right in front of me, with an easy way to mark them as done, or reprioritize them, based on MY workflow, and not that of the bug tracker.
Syndicated 2009-03-24 12:02:59 (Updated 2009-03-24 14:10:22) from dobey's blog