[hinkley]

I told my UX buddy half a dozen years ago that I was optimistic that there seemed to be a glut of UX people coming because we were going to steal a bunch of them to look at DevEx issues.

I spent some time nerding out over woodworking hand tools a few years back and it pretty well cemented for me something that I’ve suspected for most of my career: people down in the muck have very limited vision. That your output is only better than your input by degrees.

I’m not sure there would be much fine woodworking at all if the best woodworking tools were only as good as the best software tools. There is no Lee Valley of developer tools. You can’t make me stop using JetBrains (individual licenses were their best idea every), but it still doesn’t rate above a Woodriver, and if I’m honest some of their stuff is Stanley level, and not even the antique stuff. And their stuff is better than just about any other tool I use all day.

I suspect Harbor Freight could make better software than Atlassian, and I don’t even mean that as a metaphor. I think I could take harbor freight employees and get better requirements out of them because they wouldn’t be up to their ears in cognitive dissonance.

[werg]

Atlassian truly is the Harbor Freight of developer tools!

I'm a bit hopeful that DX might finally start getting the love it deserves. -- For better or worse, Microsoft seems to understand the potential that lies in building better tools and seducing programmers to join their fold.

[hinkley]

Disclosure: I used to work for a competitor. Some of my coworkers were afraid of Atlassian and it rubbed off on me.

Later when I used their stuff and could be (more) objective, I was sort of confused by that previous experience. They're... okay. If that was intimidating maybe that said more about us than about them.

I am probably experiencing a little backlash when I react to their shenanigans because they are not 'all that'. At all.

Trac (no affiliation) is ugly but like your favorite hammer. It is probably the least painful project management suite I ever recall using. And I used it before they decoupled their parsing and rendering logic, so writing plugins that involved anchor tags was a warren of duplicated code.

My last musing-while-brushing-my-teeth was to wonder what would happen if someone drop-kicked the Trac CSS files and wrote a new one from scratch using modern conventions.