A few weeks ago I wrote up the post on the tech I’ve decided to move forward with for my new project. This post is going to cover the collection of features, domain details (i.e. what is the use case, etc), and related project collateral. Instead of just slinging code like many of us programmers often do, I’m going to layout what I’m trying to build, what features I want, and how I’m going to put those features together before delving into actual code. This way, my hope is I’ll be able to keep track over time better, and if any of this turns into something I’ll then have something to keep working from instead of throwing a code base over the fence to other devs. A crazy action that happens all the time, but is something worth avoiding!
I was about to take the path of “well everybody uses JIRA to keep track of tasks I’ll use it…” but then after looking at it for about 5 seconds I remembered why it drives developers absolutely nuts. Especially if you’re on a real small team, you end up spending inordinate amounts of time managing those tasks vs. doing any work toward accomplishing those tasks. In light of that reminder, I’m going to just go with Github issues. The first stumbling after making that decision I present to you the first selection for the project.
After a quick few seconds I opted to use the feature based project and clicked to edit the project details. This seemed like the best to start with since I’d just be adding features I intend to build and using the list as a kind of task list versus a product management or operations style list. Of the other options, this one seemed to fit best.
Next up was figuring out how I’d track items in the project solution here on Github. Looking at the interface I could see where to add items to track. I immediately fired off to create a new item by clicking the plus, entering a title for it and hitting enter.
From there I added a few more, which you can check out here. The intial work is just putting together the techincal collateral to even more forward in any purposeful way. That includes numerous tasks, with several listed in the image of the project.
The plain list of items on Github for this first few days of work look like this. I’ve only put in this many, just to stay focused on these initial elements of work.
Now that I’ve got some organizational things going on, it’s on to next steps. I’ll detail those in some subsequent articles I’ve got in the pipeline, so as always subscribe and stay tuned!
Past article: Starting a New Project – Let’s Choose a Tech Stack!
Next article: Coming soon!