Thanks for the list, it’s quite good! However, our point is to not use third-parties for things where we don’t need it.

The point of the article is to show that you can use Github solely for project management without a third-party service.

But I completely agree with you: If you don’t like the little extra-work we do to achieve that with just github.com, it’s probably right to add another tool like ZenHub or waffle.io on top of it.

Making your toolset work for your team is the most important thing. For us, it’s enough — and maybe for a few others as well. That’s why we shared our approach :)

Gonna rant a bit... GitHub boards cost time. No one should use them. They're just an inferior option to ZenHub (or even Waffle or Asana or any number of other "board" interfaces you can tack on to GitHub). I've wasted my team's time on GitHub boards... everyone quickly demanded we go back to ZenHub.

Most projects have multiple repositories, right? But GitHub boards have it so that each board is based on one repo. Stupid. You want to see a project view of all your repos at once... front-end, back-end, deployment, whatever... not 4 or 5 separate views on it.

I feel like GitHub REALLY dropped the ball on not having a board forever, then putting out such a "beta-feeling" board. They should have just bought ZenHub -- still time... but literally any tool out there makes the boards work better than default GitHub.

ZenHub is free for small teams, and I'd argue that anyone can afford $5 / month / user. Budget $150 / month / user for any team for tools -- seems about right.

Time tracking seems very microcontrolish for such a small team, and doesn't really seem worth the overhead. If the team includes freelancers, that's of course a different thing.

You track time so you have metrics and can back up your opinions with facts.

"We need more developers..."

Ok, show me how much work we are doing... and where the hours are being spent... so we can figure out how to optimize and recruit more folks.

There isn't a team out there that can afford not to track how they spend their time. Not tracking hours is like not brushing your teeth... It's such a simple thing, takes 3 minutes a day.