Okay it's open source but self-hosting it is not straightforward.
The repo's self-hosting doc link returns a 404. Then after manually finding https://docs.plane.so/self-hosting/self-hosting, I am warned that there is a dizzying array of 4 env files.
I suppose they are in a tricky situation, in that while they want to stand out as open source, actually having people easily self-host it, is perhaps, not a goal that is currently in their interest!
Correction: removed wrong Docker-Compose command interpretation, as I have been schooled!
The Plane codebase is a good read. If you want to see a well put together Django + Nextjs project you should check it out. There has been a lot of talk recently about what open source means. To completely side-step that discussion, I have plane starred on github because I learned a lot looking at their code without ever having run it or ever using the product.
I can't speak for the Python part (which another commentator also already did comment on), but I don't think the React part is anything to highlight as "code you should try to imitate".
I just did a quick look, but it seems to suffer from common problems lots of UIs suffer from. Zero tests (unless I missed where they are located), even for things that doesn't even touch the DOM (like the "helpers"). Components filled with heavy logic at instead of being cleanly separated out. Just two examples after a quick 5 minute browse.
That said, I've definitely seen worse codebases and this wouldn't be too hard to work on in a professional setting. Clearly it works for them, and they seem to be progressing, which is good enough. But again, wouldn't flag it as "exceptional" either which you seemed to have done here.
You are wrong. Just checked Django part. No annotations, `__all__` in serializers, exists+get instead just calling .first(), etc. It's no way a good Django codebase.
Although the structure is fairly good, but I'm always puzzled why testing is so neglected, especially with projects that are popular and - hypothetically - production-ready...
It's all fair criticism. The lessons learned will only take you so far, so the caveat is that if you think it's a bad project then you're already above a certain level. Go you :)
You might take it in the context that they are shipping a real product at a fair speed so where it deviates from ideal what you're seeing is the educated choices of the tradeoffs to make in a real business (which is a statement of the plane team's opinion, yours may vary).
It’s funny as I think discord is actually kind of harder to get into than the old irc method. With irc there was no history or permanence so there was a relationship between discussion and what made it into the project as source or docs.
With discord it’s weird because the expectation seems to be on me to wade through hundreds or thousands of messages to find docs because there are people who hang out and read everything.
Its amazing to me that it has become such a default, similarly to Slack before it. At least some Slack communities tried and worked on getting the channels indexed so that it shows up during web searches, now with discord I need an account just to view the content...
A hard pass from me, especially when an answer to a simple question requires me to drink from their firehose of a search...
This is weird. It’s almost as if this is a sales pitch to non-technical management who gets to make the executive decision on what issue tracker to use.
That’s almost antithetical to “by engineers, for engineers”
If this project is driven by commercial interests, then the open-source spirit, if any, isn’t genuine and won’t stick around once VCs want the bait-and-switch.
Edit: the blog post goes at length to discuss growth hacking and “engagement”. The reason Jira is the mess it is is because they tried to accommodate the feature request of every paying customer
Edit 3: it’s possible this engagement story is to impress VC / funding first, paying customers second
Edit 4: I’m starting to see the other commentary about plagiarizing Linear in a different light, now that I’m cynical about the ethics and honesty of this project. All the non trivial contributors are exclusively from a country known for Infosys, clickfarms for social media engagement, gamifying the interview/recruitment funnel (see Grace Hopper convention). If this was a truly global crowd source effort as the GitHub stars would make you believe, you’d expect to see more geographical diversity. There’s a point where GitHub stars isn’t just a weak signal, but a negative one
> All the non trivial contributors are exclusively from a country known for Infosys, clickfarms for social media engagement, gamifying the interview/recruitment funnel (see Grace Hopper convention)
I see your other points are valid but this was uncalled for.
The person who commented the telemetry issue (Kailash Nadh) is also from India and CTO of largest stock broker, he is also known for encouraging open source software.
A large amount of contributors to GSoC and LFX programs are Indian college students.
All the dysfunctions you mention are symptoms of large population - of which I too have been a victim of. But I have seen some very good engineers in this country too.
What do you prefer? A software whose UI and workflow are good for upper management but a PITA for engineers, or a software "by engineers, for engineers" which has some sales pitch/material that can be appealing to upper management, who ultimately makes the decision to shell out the money?
It's not so much "not JIRA", it's that managing code bases outside of the code base is hard and awkward. And due respect to fossil-scm, I don't know if any way to do it otherwise.
The goal here is to look at something that tells an organisation why chnages to a codebase occurred. Each individual commit can have a nice explanation (in a given human language) of why that specific change occurred. But how does one link other commits, dozens or hundreds or orders of magnitude more.
Can they be accounted for to investors, auditors, regulators?
But equally demanding that commits link to something that links to why, it demands that the rest of the business also link to that something (ie JIRA) so they can explain why they expended time and effort
JIRA or whatever ticketing system, will slowly become the central repository of justification for expense - a great position sure, but also dangerous.
Following on, having some repository of why - of cost drivers - forces not just the software developers but the whole business to justify its activity against the repository. This seems hugely similar to lawyers billing by the 15 minute increment, and indeed a git repo will provide good billing like data too !
But the issue still exists - if I say my activity links to ticket number 1234, then we have a hierarchy (?) of what 1234 links to. The smacks of stories and epics and the whole agile package, but is also a common accounting process
my issue is that this is a neat, backwards looking explanation for what was done. It's not a good way to manage forwards.
And often I find the problem is people wanting to use JIRAs tickets to manage what will be done, not account for what has been done
Why the need to reinvent the commit message? Look at how Linux does it. If it's good enough for a globally distributed organization creating the operating system the cloud and most phones run on, it can't be completely wrong. They rely solely on mail and commit messages.
Ticketing systems are useful for a lot of other things such as keeping track of work on an individual level, or managing project resource allocations on a company wide level, but I'm not sure it's the best tool to do audits and have accountability. It will at best be a secondary source of that data.
I click the star on GitHub when I come across a project that doesn't seem immediately worthwhile, but that I might want to check back on in a few years.
I can't imagine caring about how many stars / likes something has.
Not copying existing ideas is the strangest thing to me. What is the point of spending months trying to come up with an original design, instead of just taking a proven design and improving on it / customizing it to your companies virtues?
In the fintech space I've seen so many startups hire designers to come up with original new designs and user experiences, only to arrive at the exact same design as existing fintech apps.
What is the point of refusing to stand on the shoulders of giants? Pride?
Well, I believe everyone is following on the Tailwind Template UI designs with Neumorphic-ish patterns these days. For instance, check these templates and tell me you haven't stumbled on new Startups launches these days with strikingly similar designs.
Personally, I'm perfectly fine as long as they are pleasing to look and nice to use.
All of these companies are basically soft scams. They go against the fundamental ethos of open source. It's a shame really. Also I wonder how many of these rankings are not gamed by Indian bot farms.
I believe one major difference between GH issues and Jira tickets in an enterprise setting is the lack of time estimating and work logs in GH.
I know that a lot of enterprises use the time estimates combined with the work log in Jira to time box sprint cycles based off of how long it took to complete past tickets.
Figured it out, but self-hosting was overly complicated. Does a simple app like this really need nine containers? I prefer the simplicity of something like kanboard.net that has similar features and is much more customizable.
This was a good read, albeit very long. I ordered my meal, finished it, and got in my cab before finishing this article. Congrats on the growth.
Do any companies decide to switch away from Jira onto Plane or is it only new orgs/teams? Because I find that there's a lot of integrated tooling around Jira that keeps people there.
GitHub stars are for bookmarking and most people add it and never open the repo again, I don’t know why it’s seen as some sort of an achievement or a successful IPO, it’s a bookmark, github should change it to a bookmark icon at this point.
[+] [-] luke-stanley|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notlive|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] capableweb|2 years ago|reply
I just did a quick look, but it seems to suffer from common problems lots of UIs suffer from. Zero tests (unless I missed where they are located), even for things that doesn't even touch the DOM (like the "helpers"). Components filled with heavy logic at instead of being cleanly separated out. Just two examples after a quick 5 minute browse.
That said, I've definitely seen worse codebases and this wouldn't be too hard to work on in a professional setting. Clearly it works for them, and they seem to be progressing, which is good enough. But again, wouldn't flag it as "exceptional" either which you seemed to have done here.
[+] [-] pokipoke|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blyatperkele|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notlive|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jredwards|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chx|2 years ago|reply
oh okay
> Join our Discord
sadness. where's the forum?
[+] [-] prepend|2 years ago|reply
With discord it’s weird because the expectation seems to be on me to wade through hundreds or thousands of messages to find docs because there are people who hang out and read everything.
[+] [-] JCharante|2 years ago|reply
But J, they don't want to waste their time with hosting a messaging platform!
Well if that's the case, then why would others waste their time hosting their own project management board?
[+] [-] dpoljak|2 years ago|reply
A hard pass from me, especially when an answer to a simple question requires me to drink from their firehose of a search...
[+] [-] alephnan|2 years ago|reply
This is weird. It’s almost as if this is a sales pitch to non-technical management who gets to make the executive decision on what issue tracker to use.
That’s almost antithetical to “by engineers, for engineers”
If this project is driven by commercial interests, then the open-source spirit, if any, isn’t genuine and won’t stick around once VCs want the bait-and-switch.
Edit: the blog post goes at length to discuss growth hacking and “engagement”. The reason Jira is the mess it is is because they tried to accommodate the feature request of every paying customer
Edit 2: seems they are logging telemetry by default https://github.com/makeplane/plane/issues/1694
Edit 3: it’s possible this engagement story is to impress VC / funding first, paying customers second
Edit 4: I’m starting to see the other commentary about plagiarizing Linear in a different light, now that I’m cynical about the ethics and honesty of this project. All the non trivial contributors are exclusively from a country known for Infosys, clickfarms for social media engagement, gamifying the interview/recruitment funnel (see Grace Hopper convention). If this was a truly global crowd source effort as the GitHub stars would make you believe, you’d expect to see more geographical diversity. There’s a point where GitHub stars isn’t just a weak signal, but a negative one
[+] [-] SadCordDrone|2 years ago|reply
I see your other points are valid but this was uncalled for.
The person who commented the telemetry issue (Kailash Nadh) is also from India and CTO of largest stock broker, he is also known for encouraging open source software.
A large amount of contributors to GSoC and LFX programs are Indian college students.
All the dysfunctions you mention are symptoms of large population - of which I too have been a victim of. But I have seen some very good engineers in this country too.
[+] [-] darkwater|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prepend|2 years ago|reply
So it was like a developer saying “I know stars are a dumb and imperfect way to judge a project, but here’s what it is.”
If they hadn’t written this I would think they put too much weight on what’s really not a very important measure.
[+] [-] solarkraft|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|2 years ago|reply
The goal here is to look at something that tells an organisation why chnages to a codebase occurred. Each individual commit can have a nice explanation (in a given human language) of why that specific change occurred. But how does one link other commits, dozens or hundreds or orders of magnitude more.
Can they be accounted for to investors, auditors, regulators?
But equally demanding that commits link to something that links to why, it demands that the rest of the business also link to that something (ie JIRA) so they can explain why they expended time and effort
JIRA or whatever ticketing system, will slowly become the central repository of justification for expense - a great position sure, but also dangerous.
Following on, having some repository of why - of cost drivers - forces not just the software developers but the whole business to justify its activity against the repository. This seems hugely similar to lawyers billing by the 15 minute increment, and indeed a git repo will provide good billing like data too !
But the issue still exists - if I say my activity links to ticket number 1234, then we have a hierarchy (?) of what 1234 links to. The smacks of stories and epics and the whole agile package, but is also a common accounting process
my issue is that this is a neat, backwards looking explanation for what was done. It's not a good way to manage forwards.
And often I find the problem is people wanting to use JIRAs tickets to manage what will be done, not account for what has been done
[+] [-] xorcist|2 years ago|reply
Ticketing systems are useful for a lot of other things such as keeping track of work on an individual level, or managing project resource allocations on a company wide level, but I'm not sure it's the best tool to do audits and have accountability. It will at best be a secondary source of that data.
[+] [-] avgcorrection|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martypitt|2 years ago|reply
20k stars in a single year is a very impressive feat.
Congrats to the team at Plane, and thanks for this.
[+] [-] potamic|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captn3m0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] holsta|2 years ago|reply
I click the star on GitHub when I come across a project that doesn't seem immediately worthwhile, but that I might want to check back on in a few years.
I can't imagine caring about how many stars / likes something has.
[+] [-] CSDude|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lijok|2 years ago|reply
In the fintech space I've seen so many startups hire designers to come up with original new designs and user experiences, only to arrive at the exact same design as existing fintech apps.
What is the point of refusing to stand on the shoulders of giants? Pride?
[+] [-] Brajeshwar|2 years ago|reply
Personally, I'm perfectly fine as long as they are pleasing to look and nice to use.
- https://spotlight.tailwindui.com
- https://pocket.tailwindui.com
- https://protocol.tailwindui.com
- https://commit.tailwindui.com
- https://mailgo-rho.vercel.app
- https://ioacademy.vercel.app
- https://split-xi.vercel.app
- https://starboard-one.vercel.app
No relations with any. Stumbled on them here on HN and an early customer of TailwindUI.
[+] [-] otikik|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s_Hogg|2 years ago|reply
Gives a 404. I hope they see this message, it was the only thing I wanted to read really.
[+] [-] ilrwbwrkhv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] terseus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marktolson|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ElijahLynn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] risfriend|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsiefken|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmezzetti|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoofhearted|2 years ago|reply
I know that a lot of enterprises use the time estimates combined with the work log in Jira to time box sprint cycles based off of how long it took to complete past tickets.
[+] [-] keep_reading|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guappa|2 years ago|reply
I routinely get stars from completely empty accounts that star random projects for free to avoid bot detection.
[+] [-] nick137381|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] TotalCrackpot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JCharante|2 years ago|reply
Do any companies decide to switch away from Jira onto Plane or is it only new orgs/teams? Because I find that there's a lot of integrated tooling around Jira that keeps people there.
[+] [-] amne|2 years ago|reply
But I don't understand with all the comments pointing out the traps you have to avoid to get plane running on local why it got to #1?
What I don't understand even more is what was wrong with redmine?
[+] [-] ilrwbwrkhv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tamimio|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pjmlp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gureddio|2 years ago|reply