DiscoTask

Yesterday I decided to post on hacker news. The title of the post was "Show HN: An infinitely nested task manager where progress bubbles up to the top" . I didn't share the link with friends or tell anyone I knew that I was posting there and went to watch the new Star Wars. When I checked back after the movie, it was on the front page (15th). The highest I noticed it got was 11th. By the next morning it went down to 34th with 103 points and 67 comments. I'm very happy with the feedback I got, some about the app and others about the tech. It also went from 12 to 400+ users by the next morning, however I will take this number with a grain of salt because signing up is free, and you needed to signup to try the app. Will be interesting to see if this leads to any recurring users.

From experience I knew the more I held off on launching the more I'd want to hold off. Doing a soft launch makes things a lot less stressful. Get everything in the production environment sorted, even if it's not a finished product. This makes life way easier when you're ready to share.

A coworker / project manager at the company where I work was looking at alternatives to Trello. Trello is great for small projects, but it becomes a headache for bigger ones.

• It's hard for PMs to see the overall progress and big picture stuff.
• Tasks always end up piling up in one list (like QA or On Staging).
• Developers or Designers creating their own tasks (the details) make the board messy (hides the big picture).
• Related tasks are not kept together. (If there's the same task for design and for development, those two cards are not kept together, even though they should be)

I started a designing a task manager that is structured as a nested list. That way small detail tasks aren't mixed up with core tasks, and the progress of the detail tasks bubble up to form the progress of parent tasks.