Check out https://www.hello.coop/ – super early, but they're building this, with an unusual governance structure designed to keep control in the hands of users.
I posted this on a different topic recently and it's apropos again: I'm currently reading Tim Wu's "The Attention Merchants" about the history of advertising and can't recommend it enough. It's informative, thoughtful, and well-written, but not a happy or encouraging story, alas.
I'm currently reading Tim Wu's "The Attention Merchants" about the history of advertising and can't recommend it enough. It's not a happy or encouraging story, however.
We had the same problem in our 2016 Outback until the head unit died. The only thing we really miss about it is the backup camera; but we can live without that, and apparently the stereo, as a fair price for being free of bluetooth audio hell.
Not sure if it matters, but many aftermarket head units can have the reversing camera connected to restore factory functionality, I believe the average HN reader could do this.
Constructor co-founder here – thanks for the shout-out, Peretus! Seeing customer feedback like this is a great way to start my day.
For anyone who doesn't know us, we have an unhealthy obsession with simplicity and set out to build something as conceptually simple as Trello but with much better usability, and specifically for software teams.
Shameless plug for Constructor[1], we're early (new website on the way) but have a bunch of happy customers, many of whom came from Jira, the rest mostly from Trello (to which we're most often and justifiably compared, we keep it simple!)
There is no end to the search for a developer productivity metric, but it refuses to be found for reasons that are fairly obvious to technical people, but that doesn't stop people from trying – for decades. So now they've retreated to these vectors called "frameworks" that try to obscure with complexity the fact that they are not in any way able to "measure what matters" – in this case, the ratio of value output to value input – nor are in any way deserving of the term "metric". I contend that such non-measures are of absolutely no value to engineering managers; they're management theater and purely a distraction and a waste of time.
Let's leave aside for a moment that this piece begins with an impressively uninformed and circular definition – "Developer productivity, in general, refers to how productive a developer is during a specific time or based on any criteria." – and focus instead on the question of why does this stuff keep popping into existence; what's behind it?
As a tech exec who's researched and given several talks on this to large audiences of non-technical execs like CEOs and CFOs, I believe the root causes are an understandable and intense desire for "visibility" and exec accountability coupled with a set of false beliefs held by non-technical managers including "anything can be measured if you try hard enough" and "nothing can be managed unless it's measured" and the classic quantitative fallacy of "things that can be measured are more important than things that can't be". Besides, it's only fair that if the VPs of sales and marketing have to stand up and talk about funnel metrics and sales rep productivity (with real metrics like net new bookings divided by fully loaded sales rep cost) that the VP of engineering - an often enormous fraction of a SaaS company's budget – should be similarly held to account for some number, any number, we just need a number, so we can look for "trends" (actually, noise). It also seems to be driven by a push from HR for fairness in promotions and terminations, which is also totally understandable, yet misguided.
I have a wisecrack response to non-technical executives when discussing this which is "how do you measure your own productivity?" that helps them understand the absurdity of what they're trying to do and how common it is that no true measure of productivity exists. People really struggle to understand that some metrics, no matter how great it would be to have them, simply do not exist, and so we have this – measurement theater.
Thanks for your feedback and questions! Constructor is a great choice for teams using Trello that are feeling the pain of its limitations but don't want to sacrifice its glorious simplicity, or teams using GitHub Issues for similar reasons, or non-dev tools like Notion or Asana looking for something that understands software dev but isn't extremely complex to configure and use. We've been building it for a little over a year now, having onboarded our first customers in Jan 2021 and raised our first round shortly thereafter.
Our differentiator is lightweight flexibility, supported by conceptual models that reflect reality and don't impose one particular way of doing things on teams. Our goal is for teams to be able to "start simple and evolve easily" because for many teams their process is always being adjusted as they grow and mature. Our approach is essentially "Trello is like 90% of what many teams need, let's redesign it from the ground up for software teams and get it to 100%". It's early days but it's an approach that seems to resonate with many teams. At least partly this is because PMs and designers readily understand Constructor instead of being annoyed/overwhelmed, so everyone is happy using the same tool, and that's pretty important (to avoid tool schisms).
It's a practical limitation; we don't have a mobile app (yet) nor is the web app mobile-optimized (yet), but you can certainly use it on your phone – and hurl abuse at us until we fix it.
