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    1. I'm looking for a project management tool similar to gantt but... different

      I'm wondering if this type of tool exists. Basically, I am senior dev of a 3 man dev team at a non-tech company. I maintain 60 or so web apps for our 300-400 users (all internal apps) as well as...

      I'm wondering if this type of tool exists. Basically, I am senior dev of a 3 man dev team at a non-tech company. I maintain 60 or so web apps for our 300-400 users (all internal apps) as well as act as jack of all trades when it comes to SQL, IIS, self hosted and cloud hosted windows server boxes, VMware, etc. Basically, I have a lot of spinning plates.

      We are in active development but we get interrupted a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Because of this, we don't really work based on deadlines but more on timelines. Upper management knows that things get priority over other things and we have to move things around and pivot a lot, so as long as we can explain why a project took 6 more months than we projected, it's fine.

      So having said all that, I'm looking for a timeline system similar to gantt but I want the ability to have more than one "timespan" per task/row.

      So for example let's say I'm building a to-do app and one of the tasks is to figure out the theme/color scheme of the app. I think this will take 3 days, and I don't really need to be more specific than that, they aren't trying to micro manage. However, I got interrupted and pulled off the project in the middle of that task, so I worked on it for 1 day, I had other things for 3 days, and I came back to finish the last two days.

      In this case, in a gantt chart, your task can only be one "timespan" per "row" and in order for me to chart what actually happened, I need to add multiple subtasks to that task and the task ends up taking 3 rows of space.

      This is rough to read and annoying to have to rearrange and insert new subtasks and rearrange subsequent tasks along the timeline.

      Is there a tool out there that handles this more "ad-hoc" scheduling that I'm looking for?

      Ideally what I would like is for me to be able to put together a full estimate of time for the project (say 3 months) with the ability to cascade schedule changes down when a task in the middle goes on longer than expected or gets interrupted.

      I would like to have categories or color mapping so we can see which timespans are interruptions and which are tasks done and tasks to do.

      Am I asking too much? Does gantt have this ability and I've not found the right vendor?

      Right now my temporary solution is excel but it's a beating to have to go shift things every time I have an interruption, I feel like I spend more time explaining what happened than I do actually programming, haha

      Edit: I've seen things like Monday.com and Microsoft project, but these are really heavy and too specific for my needs, I don't want a lot of context or setting up a kanban board or anything like that, I just want effectively an interactive timeline with simple "I'm doing this for x days" and not much else in terms of percent complete, details of the task, sprint integration, etc.

      Think trello in complexity, just time-based and sideways 😅

      I don't want to be a project manager, I don't have time for that - I just need the ability to quickly track interruptions and be able to use it as backup if upper management comes poking around

      24 votes
    2. The decline of username and password on the same page

      Web devs: what's up with this trend? For enterprise apps, I get it
single sign-on needs to detect what your email domain is to send you to your identity provider. For consumers, I feel like it's...

      Web devs: what's up with this trend? For enterprise apps, I get it
single sign-on needs to detect what your email domain is to send you to your identity provider. For consumers, I feel like it's gotta be one of these reasons:

      • Users don't know about the tab key being able to move to other fields on a page
      • Mobile users don't really have a tab key, despite there being "previous/next field" arrows on the stock iOS keyboard since its inception (Android users, help me out please)
      • Users tend to hit Enter after typing in their username, leading to a form submission with a blank password
      • Security, maybe? In the past I have sent a link and a password in separate emails or separate communication methods entirely. Are you hashing/salting these separately for better MITM mitigation?

      Did your UX team make a decision? Are my password managers forever doomed to need a "keyboard combo" value for every entry from now on?

      Non-devs: do you prefer one method over the other? If so, why?

      Tildes maintainers: selfishly, thanks for keeping these together :)

      71 votes
    3. Older folks: Do you feel like work ethic has changed? Better or worse? Do you notice any generalizations? Have the times changed that much?

      Just wondering what the sense is from others. Is it even a thing that you notice if you are in a more detached, work from home setting? Were “things different in my day, harumph!” This isn’t...

      Just wondering what the sense is from others. Is it even a thing that you notice if you are in a more detached, work from home setting? Were “things different in my day, harumph!”

      This isn’t intended to be a ranting thread on millennials or such. But I’m rather genuinely curious what is considered “normal” in terms of work ethic and work attitudes.

      38 votes
    4. Has anyone else noticed a difference in their winters?

      I moved to a place with an "actual" winter just over a decade ago -- snow, freezing temperatures, etc. In the first couple of years, I got what felt like a genuinely solid winter. Lots of...

      I moved to a place with an "actual" winter just over a decade ago -- snow, freezing temperatures, etc. In the first couple of years, I got what felt like a genuinely solid winter. Lots of blisteringly cold days. Snow that fell in large amounts and stuck around for most of the season. I love winter, so this was great for me.

      In recent years, however, the winters have been milder and milder. When we do get snow, it's only around for a bit because days above freezing are now frequent enough that it's able to melt between snowfalls. Also, the snowfalls themselves are more intermittent. This year specifically we've actually had more rain than snow. I don't remember getting rain in January when I first moved here.

      It irks me a bit because the shift has been so stark and noticeable in such a short period of time. There's a part of me that thinks that it's not a big deal and maybe my first years here were unnaturally cold and snowy for the area, so what I'm seeing now is simply the other side of the mean, but then there's another part of me that feels like that's simply a comforting lie I can tell myself in the face of the obvious effects of climate change.

      Is there anyone else here that feels like they're missing their winters?

      56 votes