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jamespaden

It's only $3 for life for beta users :)

More seriously though, thanks for the feedback. We're not sure what the best pricing is yet. $10/user/mo is in line with similar products and is a small price to pay for getting rid of unnecessary overhead and management. It might be too high though.

Probably not as interesting now that you can play with the actual tool, but we also wrote several blog posts describing our thinking and goals for solving this problem:

https://www.expectedbehavior.com/building-burndown/keep-the-...

https://www.expectedbehavior.com/building-burndown/schedule-...

https://www.expectedbehavior.com/building-burndown/many-hand...

https://www.expectedbehavior.com/building-burndown/where-tas...

https://www.expectedbehavior.com/building-burndown/you-can-o...

This is just v0.1 of the tool, so we haven't solved/built all the above yet, but maybe it shows some of our thinking process.

Show HN: Big Picture” project management for software developers

https://projectburndown.com

We got tired of not being able to accurately answer "When will this be done?" and "Will anyone be required to work overtime on the current schedule?", or spending too much time in meetings and standups trying to answer those questions. Just opened up for beta. Would love some opinionated developers to guide future improvements (or feedback on the general idea).

( Read More... | 5 comments | 8 points | on HN )
Thanks for the insight!
Ha! I think project managers as infrastructure makes a lot of sense. Just seems like there should be ways to smooth out the process, especially with smaller teams/companies so less project management is required.
No problem! It's a weird question to ask. A lot of companies just hire a project manager and let them work it out. There seems like there should be a better way, or at least some partial alternatives. I'm hoping to find some answers.
There's obviously a lot of different project management strategies.

Some companies seem to have project managers assign daily tasks to each developer. The PMs then spend a lot of time defining the tasks and moving the schedule around. They have weekly/daily meetings with other PMs to do cross-project planning.

On the other hand, Basecamp's Shape Up (https://basecamp.com/shapeup) process defines a desired outcome with some clear parameters and a six-week deadline and simply lets the team figure out the rest. There's not a lot of project management happening on a week-by-week basis.

So my question is, what do teams in the middle of those two extremes do? How do teams spend less time on minutia of planning projects and tasks and more time doing?

Who breaks the work down: you or the PM?

Does the PM ever bother you to get the status of something, or is it always clear from the kanban board? I've seen the "bug the developer for a status update" move a lot in the past.

Agreeing on the API contract seems like a fantastic way to streamline the process!

Ask HN: How do you avoid wasting time on project management?

I'm shocked by the amount of time development teams spend "managing" projects instead of working on them.I've been interviewing people for an upcoming software project and it's considered normal for someone (project manager, senior team lead, CTO, whoever) to spend hours every week discussing the plan for the week. Then, of course, the plan changes and they spend more hours moving the plan...

( Read More... | 12 comments | 5 points | on HN )
How do you differ from Skypher.co, which is another YC company? We're about to sign up with them.
Re:Docbook on Thursday November 07, 2019 @03:21PM (#21476903)
Biased cause I work there, but DocRaptor offers a saas API version of the Prince library with a much lower usage-based monthly fee.
Those things can be really difficult with the browser-based libraries because the browsers don't yet (and seemingly never will) support CSS Paged Media. That's why commercial engines like Prince and DocRaptor (which uses Prince) exist. These engines were designed for document generation and have much better support for headers/footers, table of contents, page numbers, etc, etc..

Disclaimer: I work for DocRaptor

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-page-3/

Re:Ask HN: How do you generate PDFs? on Thursday March 14, 2019 @01:33PM (#19391459)
Hi, I'm a developer at DocRaptor. What about DocRaptor didn't work for you?
I'm a developer at https://docraptor.com. We're an official Prince partner with a SaaS pricing model, but we've got a separate JavaScript engine for that very reason.
Re:Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support on Thursday April 13, 2017 @11:45AM (#14107974)
That's also an API service, http://docraptor.com, with a different pricing model that uses the Prince library for PDF rendering.
DocRaptor is based on PrinceXML, but also includes a much more advanced JavaScript engine
Re:Latex to HTML5 Conversion for Scientific Papers on Tuesday September 22, 2015 @10:44AM (#10258889)
PrinceXML is definitely the best tool, but there are a couple similar commercial alternatives and wkhtmltopdf have become a decent open source solution as long as you want basic docs.
Re:Pdfmake – PDF printing in pure JavaScript on Sunday May 31, 2015 @09:02AM (#9634026)
Commercial, but DocRaptor does with some additional Javascript parsing on top of PrinceMXL
Re:Pdfmake – PDF printing in pure JavaScript on Sunday May 31, 2015 @09:00AM (#9634022)
It, it used QTWebkit directly. Wkhtmltopdf uses a forked version of Webkit with several PDF-specific enhancements (better support for paging, fixes a couple bugs, etc).
Re:Ask HN: Simple alternative to Google Analytics on Sunday May 17, 2015 @08:23PM (#9562322)
http://get.gaug.es/ was built to do exactly this with unlimited sites.
Re:Where Is The Fold [News.YCombinator.com] on Monday March 29, 2010 @03:05PM (#1227267)
I'll consider that, but I don't think netbooks generate enough traffic to be truly relevant yet.