Introduction
My name is Frank đ
Iâm a software developer and an engineering manager at my day job. For years I have had side projects, developing small projects, because I feel Iâm not satisfying my urge to the craft, to develop. Develop something from nothing, getting an idea and building it. The most satisfying and productive feeling I can think of.
I started as a software developer, and am now an engineering manager at a medium sized fintech company in Denmark. As my role and responsibilities have changed, I noticed a lack of coherence and vision of mine and my colleagues day-to-day tasks. We would have all sorts of long term goals and roadmaps, but no structure to navigate through our everyday tasks.
We run everything through GitHubâ˘, and works great for issue tracking and keeping track of general progress, but have you ever tried to get an overview of all your current tasks on GitHubâ˘?
Usually what Iâm interested in as a developer, is what issues I have been assigned, the status of the pull requests I have created and other developers pull requests that I have been assigned or requested a review to.â¨In GitHub⢠this requires 4 different browser fans.
For all those 4 categories, I usually have between 10 and 30 tasks. How do I prioritize those 30+ tasks?â¨GitHubâ˘s own solution for this is their âProjectsâ, which is really nice, but I have to manually add all my tasks, including new ones when they arrive, and I know myself, there is no way Iâm going to remember to keep that list up-to-date.
And now as a manager, my team often requests which of their tasks to prioritize, and then again I have to have 4 browser fans of GitHub⢠for each of my 11 colleagues.
What I built
That gave me the idea for Sweetjab. At first I had a talk with my team, and fellow manager colleagues, to find a solution or service for this problem. Suggestions varied from Jira, which doesnât solve the problem, just adds another layer of issue tracking, and introduced another layer of communication, since an issue could be discussed on Jira and Github. Another suggestion was to have a GitHub⢠actions script send issues automatically to Projects. But that required implementing a script on all of our 150 repositories, adjust it every time we wanted a new project, and additional setup with new repositories and team members.â¨â¨So In my spare time I played around with the GitHubâ˘Â API, made my first draft in a few weeks, which was basically a single list of all tasks on GitHubâ˘. We used it at my work for organising. It was fun to make and well received by my colleagues, so I spent an additional few months to make a more useful version, which you are experiencing today!
Screenshots
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