Author Archives: gusaiani

My Year in: Books

Any year in which you read Grande Sertão: Veredas is automatically excellent.

This year I read 32 books. I may have broken my record of rereads at 4. I continued reading in Italian, 2 books this year. Or should I start saying “consumed” books? Thirteen out of the 32 were audiobooks.

It may be hard for a non-Brazilian to understand what about Grande Sertão: Veredas makes it the best book of all time. It is probably as difficult as can be to translate. It is very hard to understand at first, even for solid, native readers. Suffice it to say that it is on par with the Iliad, the best Goethe or Shakespeare. Ranking works of art is nonsense. Still, Grande Sertão is number one for me.

If not for Grande Sertão, 2019 would have left a lot to be desired in terms of my reading. I am happy to put in a good word for Crucial Conversations, a book I listened to and immediately repeated. I seem to have reached that age when any meaningful personal growth is to do with interpersonal skills.

Crucial Conversations was one of several books I read around communication and management, the one big topic for me in 2019. It always feels like most of these books could have been fine as shorter blog posts, but you never know which ones should truly be books and I end up reading them whole. Also, a single good idea may easily be worth the dozen hours we spend on a given book, and that makes me think of The Culture Code, a serious candidate for a future reread as it may contain 2 or 3 really good ideas.

But then there is Grande Sertão: a book where every line, every phrase and word explodes with meaning, with angles on life, a love story to make Romeo and Juliet robotic and numb by comparison.

Maybe I’m ripe for some fiction after a long hiatus.

I log my reading, done or intended, on Goodreads. Please friend me there if you’d like and let’s find the next amazing book.

A personal take on interviewing programmers

A few months ago some members of the team I lead at Toptal’s core team started interviewing programmers.

The fundamental questions that popped up were simple and deep: What should I look for in the interviewee? How do I know I should pass or fail the person?

I really like the priorities my own former supervisor, Timo Roessner, advocates: to look for—in decreasing order of importance—a team player, a good communicator, and a technically excellent person.

The person should ideally be very good at all 3 requisites. The main point, however, is deemphasizing technical wizardry in favor of interpersonal skills.

How to assess team-playing chops in a 90-minute interview with a coding challenge

Team-playing chops and communication chops seem intermingled, and in fact I believe one potentializes the other, but they can be assessed quite separately in software engineers.

As you facilitate a coding challenge or nearly pair-program with the interviewee, try to make it as close to the interviewee’s normal workflow as you can. Don’t use CodePens, have the interviewee use the editor or IDE of her preference. Apart from the technical things you need to evaluate her on, encourage her to use her favorite tools and procedures.

What you need to evaluate the candidate on is up to the needs of your company or team, but in general I prefer to give the candidate a wide-open small project instead of some algorithmic or procedural task. The reason is you will get a chance to role-play being the customer or Product Manager, and you can talk to the interviewee as such and see if she is able to conduct a dialog like this.

Calibrate, as you go along and get a sense of the candidate, how high-level or low-level it’s better to be. That is, is this person more concerned about the coding nitty-gritty or about what the entire project should do? Both are fine and necessary programmer inclinations, but the quicker you spot the candidate’s preferences, the quicker you can develop a rapport.

As the coding challenge starts, pay attention to the questions and shared thoughts. It should be clear to you, given some experience, if the candidate has mileage or a willingness to openly express thoughts. If they don’t say anything at all, probably this person will behave the same way at work.

Avoid, or delay, “helping” the candidate. Generally, in a coding challenge lasting 1 hour, I may interfere 1 to 3 times. But when you do, try to make it very meaningful and make it so that the proposed change of course really takes things in a different direction.

For example you propose the programmer develop a simple game. She starts by crafting the algorithm that will define if the game is over. As the interview goes past half its allotted time, and if the candidate has shown a good direction regarding the solution, propose she create the UI (if she is a frontend developer), or suggest creating a way to store a leaderboard (if she is a backend developer).

The way the candidate reacts to such proposals can be telling of a team player.

Also, very often candidates will do or say things that you don’t know anything about. Tell them you don’t know anything about that and see how they react. Do they explain it to you? Are they surprised? Do they convey a sense that they respect you less for that? But don’t pretend you don’t know something you know—you don’t need any trickery to interview people well.

How to assess communication chops

Assessing communication skills is a bit easier than assessing team-player inclinations. Start with the basics: can you even understand what the interviewee is saying? Often that is not the case. If and when you don’t, tell them that in a gentle way. This happens particularly often in international interviewing when spoken languages are not native to you or the candidate.

The opposite can happen: the candidate does not understand you. You should, of course, try your best to communicate clearly, and if the candidate still has a hard time getting what you are saying or asking, notice if they have the energy to ask you to clarify. If so, that is a good sign.

Being able to listen deeply is what differentiates an ok communicator from a good or great one. Does the candidate flow from what you are saying? In other words, can you notice them using and reshaping pieces of your discourse? Repeating things back to you transformed? Those are good signs. If they just respond things that seem unrelated to what you have been saying, then clearly this is a minus. More often things fall around the middle, and with time you will develop a feel for how good the candidate seems to be, plus the courage to use your intuition when the decision is not clear-cut.

How to assess programming chops

This is the easiest part if you yourself are a programmer, but it’s still challenging sometimes. Granted, it’s easy to reach a conclusion in extreme cases: if the candidate did really poorly or just brilliantly in the coding part.

When things fall more in the middle, which is by far the most typical, your skill can make a huge difference in the decision to say Yes or No to a candidate.

I always like it when a candidate writes, in human language, something like a list of things that need to happen in the program. For example, if the proposed task is to build a search user interface: to jot down that the screen has an input and a submit button, the user will type a string in that input, then press the submit button, and so on. This helps the candidate “think like a computer”, it allows her to expose her thought process to the interviewer and, if her assumptions are off-base, to know early. The worst that can happen is to end up with a little algorithm of what to code.

TDD, or anything similar to that, is a huge positive differential. It is a kind of planning ahead.

I must say it’s very rare that anyone uses TDD in interviews I run, and I’ve run a few hundred of them at the very least. It has never ever happened that a candidate wrote down point by point what should happen in the application.

Finally, good code architecture early on is one of the strongest signs that the candidate is good. If they refactor continuously, improve variable names often, and order things in their codebase without losing their train of thought, you are looking at a hire. And that’s why giving people much harder tasks than they will face in their work is typically not a good idea: you need to see how they can make code understandable to fellow programmers.

So if they start one file and fill it up with disorganized, commented out code and huge blocks of attempts, unless you asked them to do something too hard, in general consider this as a potential flag. But don’t get stuck to this: it’s not uncommon for great developers to seem quite sloppy the first 15 minutes in, and 10 minutes before the hour, to start deleting code and apply a final layer of improvements that leaves the code looking quite wonderful.

If you give the candidate a project that is larger than the hour you have to interview, something I support you do—as long as you set the right expectations, otherwise you will have a frozen person in front of you—, and you enabled the candidate to own the code in her machine, the bonus point is them continuing the project on their own. Until recently I sometimes suggested they do it. Nowadays I don’t even suggest that. If they have a way to reach me, they can do it if they want. I certainly take it as the strongest sign of interest in the part of the candidate if, hours or even a couple of days later, they get in touch with the completed project.

Participating in Daily Standups



Purpose of Daily Standups


You should leave a daily standup:

  1. More energized than you entered it.
  2. Aligned to be in contact after the daily with anyone if your or their main task needs discussion.
  3. Remembering everyone’s update.

Things outside of Daily Standups that can ruin Daily Standups

  1. If team communicates 1-to-1 a lot and not on shared channels.
  2. If people are tackling too many things at the same time.
  3. All basic management deficiencies.

How to prepare for a Daily Standup

Half an hour before the Daily Standup, stop for 5 minutes and:

  1. Decide what is the one initiative you will mention.
  2. Write it down in your own words.
  3. Edit that down to 280 characters.
  4. Include expected time to finish task at the end.
  5. Say it aloud.
  6. Improve the wording or delivery until you have a clear and memorable update.

How to decide what to mention in a Daily Standup

By decreasing order:

  1. Task you are doing that is most problematic.
  2. Task you are doing that you know someone can help you with.
  3. Task that is going well.

How to listen well in Daily Standups

  1. Keep a log of Daily Standups and make notes of every update.
  2. Come back to that log half an hour after the daily and read it again.

Trusting the Scrum Master in Daily Standups

If each team member delivers their update clearly, nicely and concisely, the Scrum Master will have time to:

  1. Ask about important items that were not selected by the team.
  2. Raise questions.
  3. Ask about extraordinary additions to people’s update.
  4. Align people for pairing on issues raised.
  5. Use the extra time for having a bit of fun and enjoying the team before it gets back to work.

Carta da Parceria de Investimentos – 2018


Caros parceiros,

o retorno da nossa parceria em 2018 foi de 11,51%. A cota encerrou o ano a R$1,08264.

Nossa parceria ficou aquém do índice Bovespa, que subiu 15,03% no ano, por 3,52 pontos percentuais.

Ano Nosso Fundo Ibovespa
2017 29,44% 26,86%
2018 11,51% 15,03%
Acumulado 44,34% 45,93%

Em 2018, descontando leituras de livros e artigos sobre investimentos, dediquei 144 horas à análise de empresas — um aumento de 27,43% em relação a 2017.

Um outro número de menor importância, porém digno de menção, foi o aumento de 49,18% nos ativos sob administração, ou seja, o total de reais no fundo. Vale lembrá-los de que toda a minha poupança vai para este fundo, e se isso porventura mudar algum dia, vocês serão informados com antecedência. O princípio é simples: objetivos compartilhados e a certeza de que estou cuidando da parceria com o mesmo zelo com que cuido do futuro da minha família.

Ao longo deste ano não vendemos nenhuma das ações que tínhamos no dia 1º de janeiro. Nosso portfólio consistia em 4 empresas: Cyrela, Hering, Metisa e Tarpon. A participação na Cyrela, que em janeiro era “nova e relativamente menor”, recebeu acréscimos e, junto com alguma apreciação, hoje representa um quarto do portfólio. O ano foi fértil em ideias de investimento, num total de duas: inauguramos participações, ambas também muito novas e relativamente menores, na Construtora Trisul e na Cielo, empresa de meio de pagamentos.

Os parceiros que prestaram atenção às atualizações trimestrais deste ano certamente observaram a grande volatilidade nas cotações do fundo, e em menor medida no mercado como um todo. É mesmo de se esperar que nosso fundo, que teve de 4 a 6 empresas ao longo de 2018, exiba variações muito mais amplas de cotação do que índices com dezenas de empresas. Desta forma, eu não me sentirei um investidor fracassado se em determinado trimestre, semestre ou ano formos pior do que determinado índice, e da mesma forma não me sentirei um gênio se o oposto acontecer. Ao longo de mais tempo, por exemplo blocos de 5 anos, o objetivo continua sendo superar consistentemente o índice Bovespa.

Uma pergunta que veio de parceiros este ano foi sobre expectativas quanto ao trimestre subsequente a cada atualização que envio, talvez uma espécie de “guidance”. A verdade é que admitir que não temos poderes de clarividência já é uma vantagem competitiva: muitas pessoas extrapolam precedentes ou apostam em repetições duvidosas de fatos para alocar capital, com consequências muitas vezes desastrosas para suas economias.

Felizmente, com um prazo maior podemos vislumbrar o futuro de modo bastante útil. É possível, por exemplo, dizer que a saúde financeira atual de algumas empresas brasileiras e a sua capacidade de ganhos, comparadas aos seus preços de hoje, nos dão grande confiança de retornos expressivos em um horizonte de 10 anos para investidores pacientes e cautelosos.

E já que estamos falando de cautela, é hora da parte mais importante das nossas cartas: os erros do ano. Em 2018 tivemos algo que tem toda a cara de erro e de qualquer modo nos custou bastante: a Tarpon Investimentos.

Comprei participação na Tarpon nos primeiros meses de 2017. Naquele momento muitas empresas brasileiras estavam à venda por preço equivalente a menos de 10 anos da média dos seus lucros recentes, mas o caso da Tarpon era mais extremo, girando em torno de 3 anos.

Não é de se esperar que empresa alguma chegue a este preço sem um gatilho negativo. Mais de 4 anos antes, a Tarpon havia tomado a arrojada decisão de, fugindo de seu histórico de investidores passivos, controlar e operar suas investidas. Não só isso: pouco tempo depois ela concentrou a maior parte de seu capital em uma só empresa: a BRF de Sadia e Perdigão.

A história é longa e até, para um livro, interessante. Hoje sabemos que ela culminou na Operação Carne Fraca e até mesmo na prisão preventiva de Pedro Faria (sócio da Tarpon que foi CEO da BRF) e no indiciamento dele, do então CEO Zeca Magalhães e de Abílio Diniz, presidente do conselho da BRF trazido ao cargo pela Tarpon.

A intersecção entre “histórias interessantes” e “bons investimentos no longo prazo” é bastante pequena, e acredito que seja mais útil compartilhar os aprendizados deste investimento para prevenir a repetição de erros:

  1. Aplicar o mesmo nível de exigência quanto a baixo nível de dívidas ao analisar as subsidiárias. A Tarpon em si não tinha dívida nenhuma, mas suas subsidiárias tinham níveis de dívidas que me fariam pensar mais de duas vezes antes de investir diretamente.
  2. Preferir muita clareza, transparência e facilidade de entender o negócio. Desvendar o portfolio da Tarpon demandou esforço. Hoje eu encaro isso como um sinal de perigo. Minhas tentativas de contato com a empresa para fazer perguntas nunca tiveram resposta. Na época eu racionalizei que, por ser um investidor pequeno, talvez não merecesse a atenção. Hoje eu racionalizaria que eles é que não merecem o nosso investimento.

O ano terminou com a notícia da intenção da Tarpon de fechar seu capital, horas após o último pregão de 2018. Mesmo ressaltando que até agora não foi divulgada nenhuma evidência de atuação criminosa por parte dos executivos da Tarpon, o fato de a empresa ter vendido ações no meio do ano a R$2,58 para cobrir folha de pagamento e, tão pouco tempo depois, anunciar a intenção de recomprar as mesmas ações por R$2,25 é um sinal muito forte, talvez até para os investidores mais pacientes, de que o melhor a fazer é agradecer ao milagre da diversificação e buscar outras ideias.

Entramos em 2019 com quase 35% do nosso portfolio em duas empresas de construção de imóveis: a Cyrela e a Trisul. São companhias de tamanhos muito diferentes, mas que têm em comum o fato de estarem passando pela grave crise no setor com as finanças equilibradas. Também aqui o fim do ano trouxe notícias que podem afetar, desta vez positivamente, nossos resultados: a mudança na Lei do Distrato. Até a semana passada, um comprador de imóvel na planta que desistisse da compra conseguiria 50% do seu dinheiro de volta. A boa intenção de proteger o consumidor acabou desencorajando as empresas de assumir o risco de oferecer novos imóveis. Com a mudança, esse percentual de restituição em caso de desistência tende a ser muito reduzido, e as empresas contarão também com um tempo de carência de 6 meses para entregar os imóveis sem sofrer multas.

Nosso investimento em Cyrela e Trisul não foi pautado em mudanças na legislação, e sim em acreditar que as administrações são competentes e que, o setor superando o momento de dificuldade, ambas estarão muito bem preparadas para dar ótimos resultados nos próximos anos.

Se já admiti que a Tarpon é dúvida em nossa carteira para o futuro, digo também que acredito que teremos longa parceria com nossas demais empresas. Acredito também que deveremos ter uma diversificação um pouco maior do que 5 ou 6 empresas, e trabalharei bastante para encontrar as próximas ideias de investimento para a parceria.

Na carta do ano passado mencionei a intenção de converter esta parceria ainda bastante informal em algo formalizado, permitindo que tenhamos valores mais significativos no portfolio. A intenção continua firme e forte. Não tenho um cronograma para isso, mas me comunicarei com cada um de vocês no momento oportuno.

Terei prazer em responder a quaisquer perguntas, em qualquer momento. Se eu não tiver deixado algo claro na carta, por gentileza não hesitem em me avisar para que eu possa esclarecer para todos.

Um ótimo 2019 para você, seus familiares e amigos!

My Year In: Books

In 2018 I read 28 books. The number means little but this is probably the lowest for me in many years.

I’ve noticed a trend this year of enthusiastic book readers becoming less so, and praising blogs and other media instead. That was not really the case for me: this year my family and I spent another two months in Italy, and again, why read books if you’re living inside one. More importantly, my wife had twins.

This year I continued to read in Italian, and I was able to read much more advanced texts like Diario Minimo by Umberto Eco, Mark Twain’s Following the Equator and Elisabeth Roudinesco’s biography of Jacques Lacan. Out of the 28 books, 5 were in Italian.

Last year I mentioned I had taken up audiobooks, and this year I continued to listen to them, 11 in total. I think I have gotten better as a listener of books, and the main thing I’ve been doing more often is re-listening to sections of books. This seems to compensate for the lower rate of absorption I seem to be capable of in audio form.

The book I liked reading the most this year was “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes”, by Daniel Everett. In it, Everett recounts his experiences living with the Piraha tribe in the Amazon jungle. His initial mission was to translate the Bible to their language as a Christian missionary. What he comes across, however, changes his own life. It’s a profound encounter of two cultures that could not be more different from one another, in the midst of another culture, that of Northern Brazil. On top of it all, Everett, also a linguist, discovers a language unlike any other in the world, and picks a fight with Noam Chomsky about what even constitutes human language. It’s all so amazing you wonder how much of it is really true. Incidentally, this one was in audio book format and it was great to hear the author reading it, warts, emotion and all.

This year I doubled down on a practice I had started, but not mentioned, last year: that of translating/transcribing books. In 2017 I went to Berlin while living in Italy and really loved it. It was my first time in Germany, and it made me want to learn some German. While in Rome I had learned of Goethe’s experience living there, and of a book recounting his life in Italy. So I started translating “Italienische Reise” from German to Portuguese, and that has been my introduction to German. One year and a half later, I’m still in page 20 of the book. I may go entire weeks without doing it, but I have fun when I translate a paragraph or two. And the links between the German language and the others I know are always deeply touching. Languages are among my favorite things in the world.

So by doubling down I meant I started doing something similar with another book. This time I am not translating but transcribing Security Analysis, by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd. It’s one of the most important books about investing of all time, I had read it before but it’s such a dense book that I thought I should do this to slow it down and spend more time with each paragraph. Almost every weekday I dedicate 10 minutes to it. At the current pace I will need several more years to complete the book. I have no idea if I want to do the whole thing, but I can say it’s been a great experience so far.

If you’d like to see all the books I’ve read in 2018, please take a look at my Goodreads year list and do friend me there if you wish.

My Year in: Software Development

The year of 2018 has been a wild ride for me. It started at EmCasa.com, the startup I described a year ago. We were in the process of putting out a successful MVP, engaging clients, becoming accelerated by Harvard University and closing out an excellent seed round with important investors. All this in just a few months.

Very quickly my job morphed from do-it-all (think product and CTO duties, plus co-founder responsibilities) to team-building. This was a highlight as I was lucky to bring in great people like Gabriela Seabra, Nathan Queija and Rodrigo Nonose, each respectively owning mobile, web frontend and backend. On the design side, Plau.co did great work.

For the first time I felt fully ready to create a digital company in style. The Elixir-React stack worked beautifully, we rolled out features fast and the development team became a cohesive unit very quickly.

Towards the middle of the year, as the company reached 14 people, it had become clear to me that there wasn’t a good cultural fit among the founders. It was one of those very painful decisions but ultimately not difficult to make when visions don’t intersect well enough: we parted ways amicably at the end of July and I went looking for a new job.

That month was tense for me. I knew I had a deadline to basically stop getting paid, my wife was 6 months pregnant with twins and I had nothing lined up as far as work.

I am part of Toptal’s network of freelancers and that was one of the main ways I tried to find the next thing. I found something that really interested me: they had posted an opening to join their Core Team. I applied, passed, and joined the team as a freelancer in August. 

The first few weeks were hard in a sense: I and two other developers coming from Toptal’s talent network had a kind of secondary status, without access to many tools. Luckily our teammates were extremely helpful and welcoming. In a few weeks we became official team members and got access to what the other engineers see.

My team works on Toptal’s public pages, from home to skill pages, basically everything a logged out user can access in the website. 

It’s been a tremendous experience for me so far, as it’s the largest organization I’ve been a part of in technology. Toptal is in fact the largest fully distributed company in the world today. As such, I work with people from all over the world, and that’s the part I like best. To do it from home is the cherry on the cake as my children are very young and being close to the family is priceless at this moment.

At my team I’ve experienced the most well-developed set of processes I’ve ever come across. The firm has reached a level of maturity that allows for very well written task tickets, a proper retrospective at the end of each sprint, interesting strategic discussions among executives, and work that has large-scale, immediate impact. On the other hand, I am very far from top strategic decisions and information, and this feels weird to me having run my own company for so many years.

To a very large extent, this was the year when, for me, technical concerns became secondary to human concerns. Sure, if you’re starting a product alongside just one other person, what tech stack exactly to choose is of paramount importance. In a team of 200 that’s much less important, as each person can focus on a narrower part of the work, and the human interactions can catalyze or hinder progress.

Thus, I gave myself the chance of observing all the teams in the organization: dialogs, processes and rituals. Whatever was visible to me, I tried to learn from. It wasn’t long before I got the opportunity to onboard newcomers, help interview candidates, conduct daily standups and interface with other companies. That’s not to say I didn’t study programming this year: I continued my deep-dive into the Elixir codebase, studied GraphQL, some more Elm, algorithms, some Python and a little bit of Natural Language Processing.

It’s much easier to paste some code or links to a framework and illustrate what goes on as a programmer. Human interactions seem to me much harder to communicate. A book that does a great job of explaining management applied to software is The Manager’s Path, by Camille Fournier. I read it this year and it very neatly sums up many things we learn the hard way, plus many others I simply did not know.

So this year was one in which I started out as CTO and ended-up as an individual contributor. But each experience has taught me a lot about management and leadership, which will be my way forward in technology.

 

Naive Investor, Episode 400

Today Naive Investor has hit episode 400.

If anything, a good excuse to post about it here.

Initially I went for posting every single episode in this blog, but pretty quickly the blog would become just a mirror of the YouTube channel.

A lot of learning has indeed taken place. That was the main goal. Along the way, people have sent me corrections, suggestions and encouraging messages.

At year end I will publish the update to the little (but growing) investing partnership I’ve been running rather informally for now, and which incorporates the knowledge gathered from the Naive Investor videos.

If you don’t yet subscribe to the channel, please consider doing so: https://www.youtube.com/c/NaiveInvestor

And here’s the 400th episode:

On Learning How to Learn

These past few weeks I took Coursera’s Learning How to Learn, thanks to Toptal’s advancement program.

My main takeaways from this course were the Memory Palace technique and the Hard Start-Jump to Easy technique.

The course is about much more than just those two tips, but I should admit that to a large extent I already knew and practiced them: chunking, diffuse and focused modes of studying, using visual analogies for memorization, the importance of sleep in learning, how apparently unrelated interests help propel deep learning, motivation-procrastination-blocks, focus on process rather than final product. If anything, it was nice to get something of a more scientific basis for things that we learn in life by trial-and-error or by imitation.

The Memory Palace Technique is useful for when we need to memorize unrelated items, for example a shopping list. It’s a seemingly bizarre strategy: you mentally place each item in, say, rooms in your home. Cheese goes on top of the fridge, detergent goes inside the oven, toilet paper on your bed, and somehow, they say, your visual brain helps you recall the items much better.

I was not aware of this technique, and so far I used it for small lists of things, and they seemed to work. We’ll see for challenging, longer lists. And also it remains to be seen in what situations this is better than just writing it down.

The Hard Start-Jump to Easy technique is a test-taking approach I was also unaware of. My best strategy when taking exams and tests was to find the easiest questions and tackle those first, leaving the hard ones for later. The course offers another idea: you start by taking a hard question. Once you feel you got stuck in it and can’t progress, you leave it unfinished and then move to the easy questions. The rationale is this warms up your brain, or sets it in focus, so you gain some performance. 

I seldom take tests these days but I can suppose this is applicable to our own day: start by tackling a hard task, use it to jumpstart our focus, and then move on to easy tasks. Maybe some fine-tuning on this idea can improve performance. I do know that I start my day, whenever possible, by studying, usually things with very long-term goals.

I wish the course went in deeper with practical examples instead of overvarnishing each concept. Still it was enjoyable and it seems likely that it’s going to add to my repertoire for learning.

A Personal Review of Task Trackers

tl;dr: My favorite is Pivotal Tracker.

Last night a friend of mine asked me about task trackers. This text is my response.

Trackers I know off the top of my head:

  • Pivotal
  • Asana
  • Jira
  • sprint.ly
  • clubhouse.io
  • Trello
  • YouTrack
  • Github Projects

Trackers I’ve used for at least a couple of months:

  • Pivotal
  • Jira
  • Trello

Trello has very low support for any kind of “point system”.

The “point system”, which consists of assigning “points” to estimate task complexity or time to finish, is a little contentious. It’s difficult to agree upon the criteria for one “point”. I learned from the folks at CodeMiner 42 to give one point to each task estimated to take from 1 minute to one morning (half a day). Simple as that. The idea is just to try and have all tasks simplified into one point. After a while the results start to show the overall performance, with almost no time wasted estimating tasks.

About 2 years ago I used Trello with a kind of plugin for points. It was very rudimentary and did not generate reports later, so it was not very useful. I am not aware of improvements to this in Trello.

Jira is very complete, and can even be installed in your server. The version I used the longest was installed that way. Consequently, it was and looked very out-of-date. You can choose many variations of Kanban and others, but the interface is bloated and visually confusing. I was unhappy with Jira.

Pivotal Tracker, as I said, is the one I like the most. I really like the fact that it’s just two lanes: Backlog, for tasks that are estimated and prioritized, and Icebox, where you throw ideas to be thought about later. The app is very powerful, and with Epics and Tags you can really organize and grow a board without going crazy.

It’s very easy to change the status of a task. Instead of dragging-and-dropping to lanes, you click Start-Finish-Deliver-Accept or Reject. It’s a simple improvement but on the aggregate it’s significant.

I’ve heard good things about clubhouse.io, apparently a newcomer to this competitive problem space, but I haven’t tried it yet.

I’ve played with Github Project, but at least at the time it missed many basic project management tools.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been using YouTrack. It resembles Jira but seems more well finished, and I haven’t seen the analytics part in detail yet.

So this is a summed up version of my feelings for task trackers.

Even if you work alone, a task tracker is an amazing stress reducer. As the team grows, it becomes more and more fundamental. If you don’t use one, I encourage you to try as many of the above as you can and see which you prefer.