Comment by oldboyFX | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oldboyFX | Hacker News Reader

Creator of "Jira Clone" here.

First of all I want to make it clear that this is just a showcase/demo product. It's definitely not something I'm planning to sell.

Additionally, it's not even remotely production ready, and it's missing about a zillion features that would make it a full-fledged project management software.

The main reason I built this was to have a good showcase for potential future clients.

The second reason was to share with the community. More specifically to show how to organize non-trivial React projects and to provide folks with a bunch of React code to learn from.

The third reason was to improve my skills and get better at working with hooks, TypeScript, and a couple of other things.

Back when I was learning React (4 years ago) I was a bit frustrated by the lack of non-trivial example projects. It was either a bunch of to-do lists, or hugely complex codebases like https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso.

I like to think that this Jira Clone presents a nice middle ground.

Bonus: Here's a Trello clone I built while learning React four years ago: https://boxd.ivorreic.com/ :)

Fewer features sounds great. I personally loath Jira, and avoid using it whenever possible, but your clone looks really nice. You can improve 100x on Jira just by making it faster, simpler, and easier to use.

One suggestion: it looks too similar to Jira, you might want to change the design a bit so that Atlassian doesn't try to sue you or something.

What do you prefer to Jira? At a former workplace we used Gitlab, which was a pleasant suite to use. These days we use Atlassian and often find myself incredibly frustrated by their products

I did a six month contract at Apple Retail Software Engineering back in 2013, and was introduced to Pivotal Tracker. I always thought that tool worked pretty well.

I've heard good things about Rally.

Trello was good and simple, back when it wasn't owned by Atlassian (the makers of JIRA).

So far as I know, that's about it.

Request Tracker (RT) is awesome.

Does it look good? Nah, not particularly.

I have fond memories of RT, but it seems like it has largely been forgotten. It was very simple. One of the best things about it was that it could largely be used via email. The web interface was very fast and efficient compared to JIRA. One major downside: Its search feature was not great, so I would usually search in my mail client.

We've been using https://subtask.co -- it has 3 pretty awesome features which I'm baffled why Trello doesn't have:

- You can break down tasks into subtasks and those subtasks into subtasks themselves, etc

- You can dynamically group task columns by who's working on them, what is their status, what is their goal, etc

- You can arrange what's to be done on an effort-value grid, which helps immensely when choosing what to take on next

Looks good but I can't find anything on their pricing..?

Hi - (creator of subtask.co here) - Noticed a few signups coming from hn and thought I'd pop in. We're still in an early beta phase now and so pricing is still TBD - we're happy to have any input on what would work for folks though.

Check out Hive. Really nice for medium sized projects.

Everyone says fewer features sounds great until the missing features includes the one they reeeeaaaallly need.

JIRA is great but only in an enterprise where there's a team to manage it, I've moved on from it and I miss the flexibility that it offers - but that flexibility comes with extreme complexity. Most small to medium sized businesses don't need it and can make do with something with less features.

As a counterpoint to this, jira is _not_ great in any environment precisely because it is so flexible and requires a team to manage it.

If a job needs to exist purely to maintain a third party tool that you pay for, you probably should find a new tool or make the tool yourself so that the employees work value is retained. It's the equivalent of doing a complete kitchen renovation on an apartment that you rent.

But jira isn't the problem that's being solved - a person hired full time would be a project manager, who in the absence of jira, would solve the project management problem with different tools.

Jira is not perfect. But the atlassian suite as a whole, with integration between CI, PM and version control, is quite powerful and more than adequate in many cases.

That said, boy have I seen it used terribly. It's double edged for sure.

I agree.

What we need is Jira and Trello to have a baby

That thought is going to haunt my dreams tonight, thanks! If I wake up screaming in horror, I’m blaming you.

> JIRA is great but only in an enterprise where there's a team to manage it

If you have a team to manage it then you may as well use that team to write your own, then you truly get the flexibility with none of the performance downside and having to program in crappy languages with crappy tools. Plus it can grow and evolve with your organization, for a start up a couple of cgi scripts on a rasberry pi are enough, for a large enterprise those cgi scripts are probably still 10 times faster than JIRA.

JIRA has become the SAP of bug of issue trackers and no one can use it well out of the box.

IMO this "Jira clone" is way beyond the middle ground, it's way too complex for that. Might be a lot closer to a product than you think. ;)

For technology showcases the RealWorld example is pretty popular: https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld. Showcasing your tech prowess is quite a bit different, I get that.

Kudos for readable hook-based code. :)

A bit off-topic: I checked out your personal website, and wow that's great! Design is simple and beautiful, copy is clear and to the point. Well done!

Missing a zillion features might not be terrible.

The whole point would be to not have a zillion features. Project management is to serve projects, not to become a thing of its own.

Thanks for sharing! You've got some nice patterns and utils in that repo.

Random question: I noticed you switched from shorthand `<>, </>` to `React.Fragment` elements. Did you have a need to use keys somewhere and decided to update them all to be consistent? Just curious.

I switched because `</>` breaks syntax highlighting on Github for `.jsx` files.

And since most people will be inspecting the code on Github, I thought it was worth switching.

Makes sense, thanks for answering! :)

You have built something very cool.

Just like Gitlab in early days. Please create a GitHub org around it and see if people want to contribute.

Only - brand it differently. Don't call it jira or clone. You'll be surprised on what a project can grow into if you paint the doors correctly.

Maybe call it Arij ;)

hey @oldboyFX, thank you very much for doing this. I really appreciate the effort and the fact that I can validate/calibrate my own skills looking at someone else's non-trivial codebase.

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