October Update
Hello! Nat here, from StoryTime. If you’re reading this, you signed up to get monthly updates about our development process.
You should also be able to log into StoryTime itself, using the address that received this e-mail. Take a look right now! We added a hover effect to stories! It’s neat! If you can’t log in, please send us an e-mail — setting up accounts on the alpha site remains a somewhat manual process but can be done quickly if you let us know we missed you.
The big news for October is that Nat and Jesse have moved to Minnesota. StoryTime is now made with ❤️ and ☕️ in Minneapolis and Austin.
We also
slightly reduced whimsy levels by calculating line numbers on initial load instead of briefly showing random emojis
made a bunch of small size and spacing tweaks to the layout
fixed some issues related to moving stories to the top of the backlog/drafts
As I write this I’ve got some work in progress that will fix an issue related to moving stories between stories and drafts which will be going out in the next day or two.
We also met with a potential customer that wants to use StoryTime to manage platform work, and had a fascinating discussion about some of the subtle ways that Pivotal Tracker was not quite right for people building and operating developer platforms.
Next Month
change the URLs for what are currently called backlogs from “live_backlogs/:id” to “/room/:id” so we can stop using the term “backlog” to mean both “a set of lists of stories” and “one of the specific lists of stories.”
fix an issue where markers don’t get automatically accepted when all the stories above them have been accepted
start collecting some usage & performance stats, so we can tell if and when we need to clean up any of the repetivie-but-convenient things we’re doing with the database.
One Weird Trick to Make Your Backlog Shorter
Once a week we have a meeting where (among other things) we look at upcoming stories in the backlog to make sure they’re all ready to work.
Lately we’ve started spending a bit of time also looking at the stories at the bottom of our backlog. Like many backlogs, this tends to become a soup of old, poorly-prioritized work that we probably aren’t ever going to work on again. So we set a timer and spend maybe 10 minutes asking, “Are we actually going to do this?” Often we discover the story in question has already been done and can be deleted immediately. Occasionally we realize that we’ve lost something important and pull it up towards the top. Usually it gets moved back into drafts.
Eventually we’d like StoryTime to operationalize this somehow and make the “backlog swamp” a thing of the past, but in the meantime, if you also have this problem you may enjoy this solution.
More soon,
Nat, Coby, & Jesse