Plane got to top spot in project management on GitHub in less than a year

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With nothing in the docs about this.

Not everything needs to be enterprise whizbang out the gate.

If the goal is just to test the application functionality, a demo site that's already set up and publicly accessible would be much easier than having to deploy a Docker container.

In terms of Nginx, using it to handle web server functionality, and especially encryption, while acting as a gateway into your containerized apps is a pretty bog-standard approach, and makes for good separation of concerns. I don't see much value in having that stuff implemented separately within each application and creating more config complexity for sysadmin work.

They even wrote a setup script that saves you from the mind-boggling complexity of docker, giving you a simple menu where you only have to read the items and press a key. If you don't know which key to press, the readme [1] is very helpful. The only place where you will have to "fiddle" with the environment files is to change the default port from 80 to another. And if you're not ready for that, or not skilled enough to understand what that means and why you might need to do it - you're not ready for self-hosting and should take a step back and learn the basics of OS administration.

Oh, and they mention nginx because this software uses nginx inside a container. Hope that answers your question.

[1] https://docs.plane.so/self-hosting/docker-compose

A simple bash template via envsubst?

My preferred self hosted projects only need one container and has a embedded sqlite database. With the option to configure a external database.

However, the docs should be good. No hidden layers, no skimped over steps, no "insert some magic here". It's your app, you know it by heart, but I'm just getting to know it.

If you do this as an established application or a developer which also sell your product as a SaaS, I assume that you're doing it in bad faith, and move on.

Maybe AI will change that. But for now I think dev time is generally better invested in other ways of making code work properly, or just fixing bugs that have already been reported.

I know that sounds heretical.

I remember looking once at a project me and some others got pulled into, where everything was working but the code was spaghetti (which, to be fair, is usually why I get pulled in), and they were having a hard time adding new features without breaking existing ones.

At first, our reaction was the same as many programmers; "Oh my god what have they done and why have they done it like this?!"

Turns out, the company was on the brink of extinction, had about two months of runway left and made this Hail Mary project to attract some new attention and eventually landed them new funding.

So the project was rushed, a lot, but that's OK, but if they didn't rush and wrote super shitty code, the company wouldn't have existed at all. They were OK with this, because they traded "existing today" for "refactoring in the future", which sometimes is the right call to do.

Beside that, money is also a big factor. Slack for example is getting more expensive for communities.

37signals and BaseCamp built products that works for their own processes based on their experience as a software team. They productized it and sold it. I’m not contesting that the product couldn’t be sold.

The issue here is bring driven by growth engagement, giving this impression that it’s about listening to the community. My cynism is that that they don’t care about what makes most sense for the product, but what drives engagement. You can argue what drives engagement is best for the users. That idea is good in theory, but in practice trying to satisfy everyone’s need you will end up not serving any use case well. Go, atleast Go 1, make explicit trade offs that made many people dislike it, but it kept the language simple and excelled at its intended use case.

At any rate, I am cynical that the project here is driven by developer interest as much as it is about impressing VCs.

All of the contributors on this project are from the country that feeds to Infosys. I’ve seen enough inflated resumes from candidates who couldn’t write a loop despite having a masters degree. Ironically, the one candidate from this country I gave raving recommendations for was the one who had bad school grades. This country is also a hotbed for clickfarms and selling fake social media engagement/reviews.

There are several websites where it is possible to buy them.

Me too.

One of the best Indian candidates I interviewed was the one who had the worst college grades... probably because they focused on internalizing the material and actual problem solving. The other candidates all studied Leetcode, and was dumbfounded when asked a simple, non Leetcode question. The question was to bruteforce and guest a password to a website. I provide them the API definition to Login with a Username and Password. All they had to do was generate every possible password between 8 and 20 characters. There is no rate limiting and we don't care about optimality or runtime. The only tricky bit is that there are a variety of business/password words such as password strings can't start with a number. If they call the API with 5 passwords that don't satisfy the password rules, they get locked out. This isn't worded as a Leetcode problem, but it's really just generating every permutation and filter out strings that don't match some condition checks (which I enumerate for them. It's not a blackbox). Asking people to program against this API: boolean login(username: String, password: String) was enough to trip up these people with Masters degree.

The problem with people cheating the system is that it harms candidates like this.

Most businesses hide the upfront discussion (or at least keep it to a smaller set of people who have often conflicting incentives for decisions as well (we tend to refer to this as politics but that's a bit like fish moaning about water.)

Anyway the point is that Linux shows how to make good decisions in the open (usually) - a process that I think most would 10x good decision making in most businesses but also lead to huge other sets of problems (worth it in my view but ...).

But Linux does not have a simple way of post-hoc justifying the decisions unless one reads the threads (which is where the recent post of open source journalist at lwn was a great idea)

But things like Jira, external ticket stores are good at providing a hierarchy to post hoc justify the decision - even if they are a terrible way to plan forwards.

So the ideal I guess is some kind of open architecture discussion upfront and some kind of extract and rebuild the rationale from commits (ie in house journalism?)

We know who’s actually under that title cased name. It’s the same monster who hurt us all those years ago

Imo it's also good to realize in this kind of software, patterns and UI are very core to the product, so you are copying the essence of what this company has spend tons of time and resources to develop. Fintech might be different as it's less about UI.

Then there is also a difference between UI patterns and branding. The first: It's good to follow standards and expectations, the second should just not be copied imo.

Another factor is asking money for it, which it looks like they intent to do. I think that makes it even weirder to clone an existing product as now you try to compete and profit from other peoples work.

There is a fine but clear line between inspiration and copying, and imo this crosses the line.

Even if legal I would not use this product for that reason, and imo it reflects poorly on the people doing it.

Yes, it is a huge beast, because big corps have huge complex workflows.

My personal experience is that most stars on my projects come from empty accounts that star random stuff to avoid getting detected when they star the projects that paid.

Why should I be the only one to suffer through these ceremonies, might as well indoctrinate the family.

Also Linear has been defining in terms of their website design, they have been doing a lot of impactful work.