Hacker News Reader

Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

Wait. What is a "to-do list app"? What else do you need to maintain a to-do list apart from a single text file and a text editor?

View on HN

It depends how complex you want to get. First, you have tasks and there a few different types, time-bound (do by friday) and ongoing (do every friday), then your tasks have to prioritized, then they have tobe linked to related tasks, often you need to manage dependencies, which can basically be a directed acyclical graph (or worse, a directed cyclical graph). Of course you often also want to be able to get various retrospective views on what tasks have or have not been completed.

A sufficiently complex to do list is more like jira than like a text file.

I wonder if the person you're replying to is correct in but in a different way.

Since text files and excel sheets are "outdated", we don't stack them up against bloated webapp that Asana is.

What if, really, excel sheet can just work? Its like we get so wound up in existing status-quo, we get narrow vision and forget the larger domain space for solving problems.

It's like the guy that ran a bunch of ETL jobs on a Macbook Air faster than a Hadoop cluster. KISS is beautiful sometimes and eye-opening. When someone brings up a ridiculous "outdated" idea, I try to keep an open mind. May be... just maybe we're wrong about all this?

I don't see it as "outdated", but mostly as avoiding unnecessary overkill. But then again, my to-do lists rarely have more than 5 or 6 items, and I don't manage other people, so I'm certainly not the public for such apps. For my use case, text files are perfectly appropriate and I would feel ridiculous using anything else. Like using a tractor to work on my tiny lawn.

How do you use a single Excel sheet across hundreds to tens of thousands of people ?

That's what apps like Flow, Asana, Jira etc are designed for. Not one or two people.

Office 365?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/collaborate-on-ex...

It's mentioned in the thread:

> I was a huge to-do list junkie, but back then all of the task apps were either single-player or weird desktop apps with syncing issues.

> I decided to build a shared to-do list app for teams.

Yeah, simple single-player to-do lists are great beginner projects to do to learn CRUD and a frontend framework. But enabling real-time multiplayer ups the ante because now you have to manage state and updates between multiple clients and a server.

Honestly I don't know and I'm amazed by the ability of people to burn cash like this.

Software is weird in that way, because a todo list is just some "mindmap", linguistic, psychological way to organize data. It could be done with paper too, or with some simple process one could teach himself or learn another way.

It's very difficult for me to really grasp and trust this startup economy. The good thing is that it feeds people and that it cycles this whole ecosystem of "throw it away and try again".

I wish software was not so chaotic and uncertain. When you add up agile, funding and decide to stop spending months to think about the app you are going to make, it's a recipe for disaster.

I'm wondering if this whole skewed startup model is somehow profitable for some people, like finance, etc. Sometimes it really feels like organized scamming.

The problem is when you want to collaborate with other people who may be distributed or asynchronous.

>I wish software was not so chaotic and uncertain.

The best thing you can do is learn how to make decisions under uncertainty.

If you don't want that, go work in a regulated industry at an established company. That work will be planned and predictable as much as it can be.

Classic HN!

Typically just a CRUD app that manages TODO items. Type in an item, store in some some data store, provide deletes, edits, etc. It was (is?) a pretty common app to build for someone trying to learn how to build CRUD applications in [insert stack].

a to-do list app is a sure fire way to get on the front page of HN

Either that or building a lisp parser in rust

I kid, I kid - these projects are all good because they are simple and can be achieved by “hackers”, using the original meaning of the term as curious programmers

Unfortunately the big projects are hard to do, but that’s why they can charge money for them

> Either that or building a lisp parser in rust

Hmmm, what about a rust parser in lisp? Now, that would be front-page worthy!

Indeed! That would be amazing..

Very tempting, must resist going down that rabbit hole :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com