| The project website of Trambar is rather oddball. I couldn’t come up with something more conventional. You see, it’s hard to write promotional materials for a tool that doesn’t solve any particular pressing problem. “A place of programmers to hang out when they got nothing better to do” isn’t much of a pitch. But that’s what Trambar basically is. It combines the GitLab activity log with—well, random stuff that users submit. Here’s how I imagine the typical usage scenario: A programmer is on a train, returning home after a hard day at work. He opens the Trambar app on his phone and quickly flips through the events of the day… “I check these fixes into git. Yay me.” “Tom did something to the backend code. Okay.” “Oh, my manager liked my push! That’s nice.” “Look what Kate had for lunch...” “Here’s the TODO list I made this morning. Let’s see...check...check...” “CAT VIDEO!” Trambar is sort of modeled after Facebook. The critical difference is that you run the software. You’re in control of your data. No one’s going to monitor what your team is saying and then bombard with targeted adverts. The aim of Trambar is modest: to make the lives of programmers slightly happier. For the price of a pizza (the cost of hosting the app at a cloud provider), you can raise your work morale by just a little bit. That’s the bottom line. I hope the website manages to convey the idea behind the software. My apology in advance if anyone is offended by my strange sense of humor. The whole thing was put together under the influence. I blame the beer. |