jenniferDewalt

Founder of Zube here. GitHub Projects seems like a nice solution for very small teams, side projects and open source projects. However, serious teams need more powerful features like a well thought out workflow, support for multiple repos and burndown charts.

Shameless plug: Zube has all these things and more - https://zube.io :)

I had tried picking up textbooks and online courses before I started the 180 project and none of them stuck for me. While I could do the exercises, but I never felt like I was understanding how to actually use the skills I was learning.

With the 180 Websites project I was forced to figure out how to apply code to make something function. I didn't always know exactly how things worked, but by starting with small manageable tasks I was able to have a pretty good understanding of what I was doing. Pushing forward, day by day, the things that were a bit hazy started falling into place.

During the project I had to travel from San Francisco to Pennsylvania for family obligations. I managed to do a pretty good job of keeping my coding schedule up while flying and spending time with my family, but I ended up having to stay up pretty late to finish each day's website.

By the end of the trip I was really burnt out but I still needed to crank something out on the flight home. I had an idea for a site where you could enter a few hexadecimal color codes and the screen would transition between them. It seemed totally easy in my sleep deprived state but when I started working on it on the plane I totally floundered.

When I finally got back home to my apartment in SF, it was 9pm and I had virtually nothing to to show for my day's work. Also, I was now freaking out. I didn't know how I was going to be able to push up anything!

I took a look at what I originally wanted to do and what little I had done and realized if I reigned in my scope a bit, I could get a website out before I completely lost my mind. I pared it down to just two colors and cut out all the bells and whistles and just barely managed to get it out the door. And then I had a very, very nice sleep.

Thank you! Pieter is awesome :)

Right on!

Thanks! Yes, repetition is super helpful. Before starting a new project, many artists will go through a 'research' phase where they'll make quick iterations of ideas over the course of days or weeks. That's part of where the idea for the 180 Websites project came from.

Thank you!

JIRA is a great tool but it's hard to set up and for small teams it can be overkill. We built Zube to provide an Agile workflow right out of the box so you can get up an running right away.

Zube is also deeply integrated with GitHub and everything is synced both ways in real time. So even if some of your developers want to stay in GitHub, everything is still up to date.

Thank you! I did a lot of Googling. Each day I would break down what I wanted to do into small components and start researching. I used sites like Stack Overflow, Mozilla Developer Network and CSSTricks to find answers and a lot of trial and error to get things working. I also used Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial to get up and running with Rails.

YC recently started a new program called YC Fellowship. We're in the second cohort now. It's an 8 week program for early stage companies that you can participate in remotely. They describe it as a lighter version of YC core.

You can read more about it here - https://fellowship.ycombinator.com

I had a lot of fun working on the 180 Websites project. It was grueling at times but pushing something live everyday was super satisfying. My favorites are Electro Bounce, How We're Feeling and Elevations.

I love working on Zube now. It's awesome to be able to make a product that helps developers.

I was spending an average of 10 hours a day, every day on the 180 Websites project. For YumHacker, I was working on that full time for about 6 months or so. We've been working on Zube for about 1 year now full time.

Thank you! Electro bounce is one of my favorites as well :)

180 websites is mostly Rails backed. The first 68 pages are served out of the public folder and almost everything else was done with Rails. The last week is all done with Node.js.

YumHacker uses Rails as an API on the backend, and Backbone,js for the front end.

Zube uses Node.js and Backbone.js.

Edit: Here's a blog post I wrote after finishing the 180 Websites project that talks more about that. - http://blog.jenniferdewalt.com/post/62998082815/after-180-we...

Hey everyone! I'm happy to answer any questions. AMA!

We totally understand your concerns and we take security very seriously. In order to manage GitHub issues, GitHub currently requires the repo scope. If there was a more restrictive scope just for GitHub Issues, Zube would use that one instead, but there isn't. Zube requires the same permissions as many other applications, the same permissions as Slack, for example.

On our side, Zube only accesses data related to your GitHub issues and never touches your code at all. All of the calls Zube makes to the GitHub API are whitelisted (on our end) to ensure that Zube only accesses the data it needs. For extra security, we also encrypt your auth token before storing it. It’s also important to note that your auth token is specific to Zube and at any time you can revoke your token on GItHub.

Gotchya! We've been thinking about how to add some flexibility to the columns without falling into the 'endless column' trap where teams end up with dozens of micromanaged columns. It sounds like that level of organization would still fit the paradigm.

Awesome! Let me know if you have any questions. I'm happy to help!

Interesting. Maybe we could make an app setting that would save points as labels. Thanks for suggesting it! And we will release a public API :) You can already see much of the functionality in Zube's Issue Manager.

We'd really like to add other integrations like GitLab. We do have a bit of work to do on our core product first so it may take a little while before we get there.

Great question! JIRA is highly configurable so if your company has a lot of custom requirements, that might be the way to go. Zube provides a lightweight, Agile workflow out of the box designed to get you up and running fast. So it depends on your companies' needs, but if you have a development team that loves working in GitHub, Zube has better GitHub integration than JIRA.

Yep, that's the game plan!

Thanks! We created tickets with non-technical people in mind as way they could report bugs, feature requests and the like without cluttering up issues for developers. Since the tickets track the work on their linked issues, the ticket owner has a clear picture of what the progress is on their ticket.

However, we've also seen dev teams hack tickets as a way to scope groups of issues together, for a feature release for example, similar to epics in Agile workflows.

Would you like to see custom statuses on board, the tickets or both?

We are really excited to add more integrations! Slack, ZenDesk and Intercom are some of the big ones we're looking at.

Got it! That makes sense, thanks for the breakdown.

Cool! That's how we're implementing it.

Thanks! The idea for Zube came from my and my cofounder's (shout out to @204NoContent!) experiences working on dev teams at our previous jobs at early stage startups. We built the tool we wished we had :)

The 180 Websites project is definitely a part of what led me to be a technical cofounder. It certainly helped me learn how to ship code and iterate!

Zube's a stand alone web app. Your Zube cards are two-way synced in real-time via the GitHub API.

Sounds good! Yes, I agree that the board should really only be for issues.

Thanks for the kind words Stephen! We've come a long way since that rickety demo :)

Thanks for signing up! We definitely have some work to do with the on boarding flow and documentation, especially around Tickets. Glad to hear you were able to figure it out! :)

A Ticket is a place where you can link together multiple GitHub Issues that doesn't sync with GitHub itself. The Ticket tracks the status of those issues and updates it's status as the issues are worked on. This works great for bug reports that need multiple tasks completed in order to be resolved, for example.

Yep, you can create, edit and delete labels and milestones from Zube.

We're working on adding multiple repos to Zube boards and should have that feature out in a couple of weeks.