Alternatives to Confluence

I have mixed feelings on GitHub as a product and our use of it for the Zulip open source project. On the one hand, I do feel that being on GitHub helps people discover Zulip, because we have enough stars (etc.) that we rank highly among projects on the platform. and there is a definite benefit for lowering barriers to contribution (which is important to us) that GitHub has such a dominant position in terms of what everyone has accounts with.

But even ignoring how one might feel about their new corporate owner (MicroSoft), in a lot of ways GitHub is a bad product for open source projects. Years after the "Dear GitHub" letter, there are still basic gaps in its issue tracker:

• You can't give someone permission to label/categorize issues without full write access to a project (including ability to merge things to master, post releases, etc.).
• You can't let anyone with a GitHub account self-assign issues to themselves.
• Many more similar issues.

It's embarrassing, because I've talked to GitHub product managers at various open source events about these things for 3 years, and they always agree the thing is important, but then nothing ever improves in the Issues product. Maybe the new management at MicroSoft will fix their product management situation, but if not, I imagine we'll eventually do the migration to GitLab.

We have a custom bot project, http://github.com/zulip/zulipbot, to deal with some of these issues where possible, and every other large project we talk to does the same thing, more or less.

We use GitLab CI because of the great native integration as a part of the GitLab framework and the linting-capabilities it offers. The visualization of complex pipelines and the embedding within the project overview made Gitlab CI even more convenient. We use it for all projects, all deployments and as a part of GitLab Pages.

While we initially used the Shell-executor, we quickly switched to the Docker-executor and use it exclusively now.

We formerly used Jenkins but preferred to handle everything within GitLab . Aside from the unification of our infrastructure another motivation was the "configuration-in-file"-approach, that Gitlab CI offered, while Jenkins support of this concept was very limited and users had to resort to using the webinterface. Since the file is included within the repository, it is also version controlled, which was a huge plus for us.

So I am a huge fan of JIRA like #massive I used it for many many years, and really loved it, used it personally and at work. I would suggest every new workplace that I worked at to switch to JIRA instead of what I was using.

When I started at #StackShare we were using a Trello #Kanban board and I was so shocked at how easy the workflow was to follow, create new tasks and get tasks QA'd and deployed. What was so great about this was it didn't come with all the complexity of JIRA. Like setting up a project, user rules etc. You are able to hit the ground running with Trello and get tasks started right away without being overwhelmed with the complexity of options in JIRA

With a few TrelloPowerUps we were easily able to add GitHub integration and storyPoints to our cards and thats all we needed to get a really nice agile workflow going.

I'm not saying that JIRA is not useful, I can see larger companies being able to use the JIRA features and have the time to go through all the complex setup to get a really good workflow going. But for smaller #Startups that want to hit the ground running Trello for me is the way to go.

In saying that what I would love Trello to implement is to allow me to create custom fields. Right now we just have a Description field. So I am adding User Stories & How To Test in the Markdown of the Description if I could have these as custom fields then my #Agile workflow would be complete.

#StackDecisionsLaunch

Last time we shared there information about our decision about using YouTrack over Jira actually we found much better solution that our team have loved. Linear is a minimalistic issue tracker that integrates well with Sentry, GitHub, Slack and Figma which are our basic tools. I would like to recommend checking out Linear as a potential alternative to "heavy" issue trackers, maybe at enterprises that may not work but when we're a startup that works awesome!

Currently, we are using WordPress in the organisation to deliver content externally to clients via a portal. However, we have installed way too many plugins for our liking, and they are starting to conflict with one another. Also, there were issues around scalability in the way we initially designed it. A few people in the organisation are leaning toward a Microsoft SharePoint solution using Livetiles, but we've been told it is mainly geared towards internal/intranet solutions as opposed to external solutions (which we provide). I was wondering if anyone has some high-level thoughts to share in regards to moving to a Microsoft Sharepoint environment vs. a more flexible solution like Umbraco.

Hey everyone, My users love Microsoft Excel, and so do I. I've been making tools for them in the form of workbooks for years, these tools usually have databases included in the spreadsheets or communicate to free APIs around the web, but now I want to distribute these tools in the form of Excel Add-ins for several reasons.

I want these Add-ins to communicate to a personal server to authorize users, read from my databases, and write to them while they're using their Excel environment. I have never built a website, so what would be a good solution for this, considering I'm new to all of these technologies? I know about the existence of Microsoft Azure, Microsoft SharePoint, and Google Sheets, but I don't know how to feel about those.

As a small startup we are very conscious about picking up the tools we use to run the project. After suffering with a mess of using at the same time Trello , Slack , Telegram and what not, we arrived at a small set of tools that cover all our current needs. For product management, file sharing, team communication etc we chose Basecamp and couldn't be more happy about it. For Customer Support and Sales Intercom works amazingly well. We are using MailChimp for email marketing since over 4 years and it still covers all our needs. Then on payment side combination of Stripe and Octobat helps us to process all the payments and generate compliant invoices. On techie side we use Rollbar and GitLab (for both code and CI). For corporate email we picked G Suite. That all costs us in total around 300$ a month, which is quite okay.

Jira is better than any other project management tool I've used, including Basecamp Asana and Trello . However, Trello has a much different purpose to me and is still amazing!

We're using GitHub for version control as it's an industry standard for version control and our team has plenty of experience using it. We also found many features such as issues and project help us organize. We also really liked the fact that it has the Actions CI platform built in because it allows us to keep more of our development in one place. We chose Slack as our main communication platform because it allows us to organize our communication streams into various channels for specific topics. Additionally, we really liked the integrations as they allow us to keep a lot of our in formation in one place rather than spread around many different apps.

Sentry has been essential to our development approach. Nobody likes errors or apps that crash. We use Sentry heavily during Node.js and React development. Our developers are able to see error reports, crashes, user's browsers, and more, all in one place. Sentry also seamlessly integrates with Asana, Slack, and GitHub.

So I am a huge fan of JIRA like #massive I used it for many many years, and really loved it, used it personally and at work. I would suggest every new workplace that I worked at to switch to JIRA instead of what I was using.

When I started at #StackShare we were using a Trello #Kanban board and I was so shocked at how easy the workflow was to follow, create new tasks and get tasks QA'd and deployed. What was so great about this was it didn't come with all the complexity of JIRA. Like setting up a project, user rules etc. You are able to hit the ground running with Trello and get tasks started right away without being overwhelmed with the complexity of options in JIRA

With a few TrelloPowerUps we were easily able to add GitHub integration and storyPoints to our cards and thats all we needed to get a really nice agile workflow going.

I'm not saying that JIRA is not useful, I can see larger companies being able to use the JIRA features and have the time to go through all the complex setup to get a really good workflow going. But for smaller #Startups that want to hit the ground running Trello for me is the way to go.

In saying that what I would love Trello to implement is to allow me to create custom fields. Right now we just have a Description field. So I am adding User Stories & How To Test in the Markdown of the Description if I could have these as custom fields then my #Agile workflow would be complete.

#StackDecisionsLaunch

This time I want to share something different. For those that have read my stack decisions, it's normal to expect some advice on infrastructure or React Native. Lately my mind has been focusing more on product as a experience than what's it made of (anatomy). As a tech leader, I have to worry about things like: are we taking enough time for reviews? Are we improving over time? Are we faster now? Is our code of higher quality?

For all these questions you can add many great recommendations on your pipeline. We use Trello for bug-tracking and project management. We use https://danger.systems/js/ to add checks for linting, type-enforcing and other quality dimensions in our PRs and a great feature from Vercel that let's you previsualize deployments directly in a PR. However it's not easy to measure this improvements over time. For customer matters we have Amplitude or Firebase analytics, but for our internal process? That's a little bit more complicated.

I collaborated recently with some folks in a small startup as an early adopter to create a metrics dashboard for engineers. I tried to add the tool to stackshare.io but still it doesn't appear as one of the options, please take a look on it over product hunt and let us know https://www.producthunt.com/posts/scope-6