Back in April, we announced a change to the way we were going to be working moving forward, so we wanted to give you a quick update on how that’s all going.
Quick recap: we decided to try moving all of our feature requests, bug reports, and tasks into Github, versus having them siloed in the helpdesk, Shortcut, Rollbar, Github, Discord, email, Mastodon, and so on.
This meant:
- going through every single open issue, classifying it as “Bug”, “Feature”, or “Task” using Github’s new-ish “type” option
- moving the majority of our Shortcut issues into Github
- updating issue titles and tags to make sure they could more easily be searched on
- triaging old issues that were long-since resolved, etc.
- moving issues that were more suited to being discussions into the discussions section
- training up staff to be able to write-up issues coming from the helpdesk to ensure no customer data is ever exposed accidentally
- closing issues that have been open for a long time but are still not really something we’re considering building and would not accept a PR for, as we’ve determined it’s not really aligned with our vision of the product
It was a lot. A lot a lot. And RIP your email if you were subscribed to be notified about every new comment on every issue in the repo. ðŸ«
But, we also knew that the only way out is through, and as of today, we’re under 1k open issues (down from nearly 2k a few months ago) and every single open issue is now classified with a type.
Unfortunately, the way Github handles milestones+projects makes it less than ideal for how I wanted the roadmapping to work, as each project is its own separate thing.
I had initially set it up so that major features (Notifications, for example) were their own projects, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to see a roadmap that includes all projects associated with a repo, so you’d have to check the roadmap for every project we’ve defined – not ideal for getting an idea of overall velocity and priorities. Milestones can cross projects, but roadmaps seem to be project-specific.
For right now, we’re largely relying on milestones to communicate what we’re currently tackling and what’s next on deck, but we’re still playing around with whether or not we can make the project+roadmap option work for us by possibly further restructuring things. (There seems to be some confusion among other Github users about how best to use this tooling as well.)
We’ll keep you posted on where we net out. It’s possible that the roadmap view just isn’t going to be viable, and we stick with milestones until they sort out things on their end. For older issues that are very complicated, we use the “original” label, so we can easily tie new requests into the original. (Bear in mind, the issue marked as “original” might not be the first discussion about the feature, but it’s the one with the most complete use-cases to help us determine implementation.)
We’re still trying to figure out the rhythm for milestones+releases. We’ll be tagging v8.2.2 very soon (likely this week), but we’re still generally releasing every few weeks. (We had the entire dev team out for a conference a few weeks ago, so we were a little behind schedule, but we’re back on track now.)
Side note, to everyone we met or re-met at Laracon in Denver and Defcon in Las Vegas, we hope you got some stickers from us! (If not, you can sign up for some here.)
And as always, we invite you to join the conversation with us:
- Join our Discord! It’s full of great people. We even wrote about it here!
- Follow us on Bluesky at @snipeitapp.com
- Follow us on Mastodon at hachyderm.io/@grokability
- Follow our blog at Grokstar.Dev
- Subscribe here on Github for notifications about new releases. (We recommend selecting “Releases” only for most users – this repo can get noisy, especially these days.)
Have a wonderful week!
Alison Gianotto
CEO and some other stuff
