GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world

https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/26/notes/

by ingve • 1 year ago

314 195 1 year ago

_mikz• 1 year ago

Don't forget the checkbox list! And linking to specific comments.

hliyan• 1 year ago

Ten years ago, I worked in a small non-profit development shop that used Github issues for all project management. Checkboxes were used as both subtasks and ACs. Now that I think back, it worked really well. I don't think we even had Slack (we used Google Talk).

Jakob• 1 year ago

On the last point on Apple Notes: iCloud has the “keep downloaded” option now on iOS and macOS for folders and files.

This makes every app that saves into iCloud files behave like Notes, i.e. work offline with automatic online sync.

greggsy• 1 year ago

How does it handle contention, and how frequently does it sync?

nsonha• 1 year ago

is iCloud still downloading and reuploading again if you drag things between folders?

jbverschoor2• 1 year ago

Noteplan (https://noteplan.co/)

orphea• 1 year ago

$100/year? No, thank you. Why does everything have to be a subscription?

tcshit• 1 year ago

… and why are those subscription fees so obscene? I guess too many people have too much money…

jbverschoor2• 1 year ago

Sure. But it’s worth it for me. It’s really great. And i have full control over my files. It’s not hosted by them. Just markdown files

j_maffe7• 1 year ago

Sounds like Obsidian but with extra steps.

Cthulhu_• 1 year ago

Obsidian sounds like text files with extra steps, but your point remains, plain text files are great. There's multiple solutions from keeping them available across devices.

alfons_foobar• 1 year ago

Well yeah, Obsidian is basically a markdown editor with some nice extra features. And apparently a quite thriving plugin ecosystem.

Lutger2• 1 year ago

The extra step is to open the text file in an editor, except in this case the editor is called Obsidian.

Granted, you do have to install it versus using the default editor that comes with your operating system, so that is an extra step. But most people don't use the builtin editors from their OS anyway.

supermatt6• 1 year ago

Is one of those extra steps “not pay $50 a year to have access on all your devices”, or maybe it’s “not pay $100 a year to access via the web”?

nsteel3• 1 year ago

I have access on all my devices through my email provider WebDAV. I don't pay anything to Obsidian for this (but I do donate to them because it actually is the best notes provider, in my opinion).

rubidium• 1 year ago

I thought it supports most file storage sync solutions? I’m using with the free iCloud level storage I believe.

cpach• 1 year ago

I gladly pay those fifty bucks. Creating good applications require hard work.

(I wouldn’t say Obsidian is perfect, but so far I haven’t found any note-taking application that I like more.)

nsteel3• 1 year ago

And unlike Obsidian, online only. Can you even backup GH issues? If not, that's surely got to be a deal-breaker.

pipes2• 1 year ago

Can I host obsidian myself? I would like to use it for work, but I don't want to expose my employer to potential data leak.

I'm thinking, host it locally and just let one drive act as back up for the mark down files it produces?

delcaran• 1 year ago

With Syncthing you don't need hosting. I use it for everything I can.

conception• 1 year ago

It’s just a bunch of markdown files. You can sync with anything. I just use a git plugin.

justusthane• 1 year ago

As others have pointed out you don't "host" Obsidian - it's just a local collection of markdown files. But if you're asking about a self-hosted alternative to "Obsidian Publish" for creating a knowledgebase that others can answer, I'm Quartz[0], a static-site generator designed to turn Obsidian markdown files into a website. I'm building and it and hosting it on Gitlab Pages at work[1].

[0] https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/

[1] https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/hosting#gitlab-pages

etra0• 1 year ago

I recently went through this effort and I'd say it's worth it. In particular, I've used the "Self-hosted LiveSync" plug-in + docker.io/oleduc/docker-obsidian-livesync-couchdb, and I setup all my infrastructure within a VPN (with Tailscale, this was pain-free).

I knew about using just git, but having Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android, it was just way easier to use this solution instead of fighting with git-like apps for each OS.

jtwaleson• 1 year ago

Broken links with 404s have been called "a feature, not a bug" of the web, but I think that for internal documentation purposes, having consistent bi-directional links is a _very_ good thing to have.

Tepix• 1 year ago

The missing feature is federation! In my view, centralized structures like a giant source repository such as github are something we as a developer community need to avoid. Unfortunately, features like federated merge requests in gitlab ( https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/14116 ) are something we've been waiting for for 9 years and nothing seems to be happening there. This feature alone would enable a lot of new collaboration without forcing everyone to work on a centralized system to use git - a decentralized versioning system - with high efficiency.

Last week, Microsoft cut off the email account of the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court, after being ordered to do so by the Trump administration. This is merely a week or two after Microsoft did a big PR campaign, telling the European Union how they were to stand up against this administration if the need arises. The irony!

Trump isn't hiding his opinion about the EU. What's stopping him from ordering Microsoft to block the EU from accessing github one day? Right now: Nothing at all. Think about how it would impact your business and open source software in general. We must not put all our eggs in a single basket.

Lutger2• 1 year ago

Absolutely. Any public institution or governmental body needs to rethink their fragile reliance on technology from countries they can longer trust. This applies to China, but the US is even more unpredictable.

__MatrixMan__4• 1 year ago

I keep meaning to check out https://radicle.xyz/ for this, but I think I'll wait for things to get even worse before I do, and then later I'll regret not having explored the durable option sooner.

Propelloni• 1 year ago

So GitHub notes let me do what Zim Desktop Wiki let me do since 2005 without requiring internet.

But I get the OP, if you live in GitHub, it makes perfect sense.

fbnlsr3• 1 year ago

Like many I've been looking for the best note-taking app for years. And somehow I always come back to a bunch of markdown files inside a Git repo.

msravi• 1 year ago

...accessed through Obsidian (esp on mobile) -- On Android, you can "Open folder as vault"

Or neovim with FzfLua (on laptop)

miroljub• 1 year ago

For me, it's the same way, except that instead of Markdown, I use plain org-mode files sprinkled with a bit of org-roam tags when needed.

triknomeister• 1 year ago

I have an idea. Coming soon!!

bayindirh• 1 year ago

Obsidian + Git plugin? :)

exe34• 1 year ago

org-roam inside git

frou_dh• 1 year ago

Compared to something with automatic bidirectional sync between all devices, something where one has to manually commit/push/pull a new/edited note feels archaic.

klez2• 1 year ago

You can automate commits and push on save. I had a similar setup for vimwiki before migrating to a web-based wiki system (dokuwiki).

tasuki• 1 year ago

OTOH you get version history, with commit messages if you care to write them. And the full power of git to explore the history. You can edit the same file on two (offline) devices, then resolve the inevitable merge conflict.

"Automatic bidirectional sync between all devices" scares me. How does it deal with merge conflicts? How am I sure I'll be able to revert to a previous version? Can I see the full history of a file? I don't know, perhaps it'd be ok. I certainly wouldn't learn git just for note taking! But, I know how to use my hammer, so everything look like a nail...

fbnlsr3• 1 year ago

I thought it would be a problem as well but it turns out I absolutely never edit my notes on two machines at once. The commit/push/pull is done via a simple bash script that I'm running as a build command inside VS Code.

prepend4• 1 year ago

I like it as I consciously enjoy sort of checking in.

I also store in a onedrive folder for automatic sync and backup in case I have a crash before I do a git commit.

AlienRobot3• 1 year ago

Is that really useful? How often do you need to revert a commit?

trevinhofmann2• 1 year ago

Might be worth trying this free and open source note-taking app (disclaimer: client of mine).

https://github.com/cybersemics/em/

"em is a beautiful, minimalistic note-taking app for personal sensemaking."

AlienRobot3• 1 year ago

No webpage. No screenshots. Not even Releases?

I'm not trying this app.

The readme is more about the technical details of the code than the actual features of the app. Where do I go to see what this thing can actually do?

Do people expect me to run the program just to see if I want to run the program?

chrisweekly• 1 year ago

Strong rec to keep using markdown files in a git repo -- and start using Obsidian to edit and manage them.

fbnlsr3• 1 year ago

I switch between VS Code and MarkText. It does the job perfectly.

_fat_santa• 1 year ago

And somehow I always come back to a bunch of markdown files inside a Git repo.

Others have mentioned this but if you want to keep this workflow, the best app I've found is Obsidian + Git Plugin. It works fantastically well on desktop though it does require a little work to get it working on iOS.

noahjk• 1 year ago

Are there options to see the current state of the repo? What I mean is, for example, I like that in VS Code I instantly know the current state because the git sidebar icon shows a notification of uncommitted changes. If I don't have a visual reminder, I'm more likely to not make commits when I should, and I also don't want an auto-committer firing after each change. I find the visual reminder keeps me anchored to my git status.

Heck, maybe I should just use code for notes. One plus would be web access with code server, since Obsidians only docker image that I know of uses VNC.

Anyone compared these two tools and have a decent write up? The biggest item which comes to mind would be referencing other notes and the features built on top of that?

naxx• 1 year ago

How do you use Obsidian + Git on iOS?

AlecSchueler2• 1 year ago

Others have mentioned this but if you want to keep this workflow...

If I want to keep this workflow why shouldn't I just continue using this same workflow?

al_borland3• 1 year ago

I oscillate between Apple Notes and a bunch of markdown files, which is a pretty painful thing to do.

I like how future proof a folder of markdown files is. But I like the design, simplicity, and deep features for capture and media support offered in Apple Notes.

The more a markdown app supports extra stuff, the more proprietary it starts to feel, as any app to read it will also need to support those things.

A while back I told myself I was going to stick to Apple Notes, as going back and forth to other things is painful, and doing it proactively means more pain, rather than maybe having some pain in 10 years of the app goes away. However, where I am again, in the middle of a largely manual migration back to Obsidian for my folder of markdown files. I used an export, but the formatting is so bad that I need to clean up every single note.

thebytefairy• 1 year ago

The inability to export, as well as the lack of anything more than the bare basic formatting options (at least at the time a few years ago) pushed me off apple notes.

xeonmc2• 1 year ago

Alternatively, you can use Codeberg to avoid vendor lock-in, or self-host Forgejo.

simonw20• 1 year ago

Not self-hosting and having a cost of zero is one of the features that makes GitHub Issues such a great solution.

I don't want to risk my notes on a configuration error or billing mishap.

xeonmc2• 1 year ago

So Codeberg then.

layer84• 1 year ago

You should arrange for backups either way.

For example, stuff like this could happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23832437

aargh_aargh• 1 year ago

Call me long in the tooth but it sounds to me like he's describing HTML (sans the backlinks part).

styfle4• 1 year ago

I used GitHub issues as a form of project management to plan my wedding many years ago.

My wife was skeptical at first, but the ability to add labels, search, etc made it really easy to work together and accomplish the tasked we needed in time for the wedding.

The hardest part was creating a bookmark that links directly to the issue tracker.

Oh, I’ve also used GitHub issues to organize all the boxes in my most recent move. I would create an issue and the description would list all the contents of a box. Then I would write the issue number on the box. After moving, I could search GitHub to find that one thing I was looking for and know what box it was in.

klez2• 1 year ago

Out of curiosity, what other solutions did you explore and why were they lacking?

ableal• 1 year ago

(Not OP)

I've used LibraryThing for book boxes. Using smallish boxes (30-40 paperbacks each) so that carrying them is not a backbreaker. Scan the ISBN barcodes with phone app, fix old ones/whatever on web app, tag with box number written on at least two sides. No problems found so far.

sph• 1 year ago

Reminds me of: https://xkcd.com/1172/

This is a fun anecdote to share, but everywhere you can find people with absurd workflows that are better dealt with using proper tools. FWIW I used Org mode to organize a move to another country. I really cannot stand the idea of feeding my personal information to Microsoft.

birn559• 1 year ago

Sounds to me like parent used a proper tool. It just happens to be very flexible. In general, the best tool is the one that you use and makes sense to you.

INTPenis• 1 year ago

At my last job we almost used Gitlab for all our project management. The only thing that stopped us was not being able to use references between projects. It's very project focused, which is of course good enough for open source projects.

But at my current job Gitlab could easily take over Youtrack, already took over Upsource.

davidgl• 1 year ago

Gitlab supports references between projects as well, we use it at work all the time.

paulryanrogers3• 1 year ago

Why not just write what's in the box on the box?

veleek• 1 year ago

Because you can’t search that without physically looking at each box. There could be a bunch odd reasons that many boxes remain unpacked; downsizing, temporary housing. It’d be nice to be able to finds the one thing you need (you could even label the issue with the box location!).

Anyway, a fun solution but I think it’s more effort than I would have been willing to put in even if I would have appreciated the outcome.

sameerds• 1 year ago

Because searching for a thing across all issues is way faster than eyeballing the list written on each box?

rzzzt• 1 year ago

I remember seeing this house renovation project on HN, but it is gone from GitHub: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4962518

bjourne2• 1 year ago

Totally agree. GitHub issues is probably the best bug tracker/ticketing system you can imagine. Intuitive interface, simple, clean, and fast. Just waiting for a Microsoft redesign to completely fuck it up. :P

kccqzy4• 1 year ago

I've used plenty of proprietary issue tracking systems and GitHub is missing several features that I now consider quite important though certainly not essential:

* The ability to write an issue summary separate from comments. When you are debugging some hairy bug, some manager doesn't really want to wade through all the comments to get an idea; an editable summary at the very top of the page communicates high-level points to stakeholders while others continue to comment on details. People work around this by editing the initial comment of the issue but it's better if there's something more dedicated.

* Sophisticated access control. More than once when someone writes a bug report they are referring to a bug experienced by a single user. For user privacy reasons there needs to be a per-issue permission system to restrict access beyond the permission implied by the repo.

* The ability to add personal notes to an issue without publishing it. Whether it's a draft form of a comment or something else, it gets rid of the need to maintain your own notes.

9dev• 1 year ago

an editable summary at the very top of the page communicates high-level points to stakeholders

I would hope this will soon be written by AI automatically; summing up high-level points in an issue discussion seems like a perfect task for an LLM.

hnlmorg3• 1 year ago

1. Summary

It wouldn’t be too hard to add that with a 3rd party plugin. You could set an event hook to run through the comments, and add it to the top comment.

For bonus points, you could use an LLM to summarise. Every company loves a bit of AI these days, so your manager can gloat with his manager buddies that you now have AI-powered issue tracking.

2. That sounds like an anti-pattern to me. There shouldn’t be PII in your dev issue tracking system.

There problem here isn’t RBAC, it’s the workflow. If you’re in a situation where you need to make notes of sensitive information then you should store that in the same data store as the source information (eg Salesforce, et al). And I say this as someone who hates Salesforce.

3. I’ve not seen this feature in any issue tracker. Sounds like a nice feature but I wouldn’t have thought it as essential.

bjourne2• 1 year ago

Every experienced dev knows what happens when they are subjected to issue trackers with loads of features: some managers require all those features to be used (cause that's what they paid for!). So instead of spending your time debugging you have to ensure the bug is properly tagged, categorized, has the right version number(s) for affected software, has the right assignee, yadda, yadda. Then some busy beaver will send you email reminding you that you haven't filled in all the drop-downs and check boxes correctly....

pacifika2• 1 year ago

Run the Orbit extension on the page. That should give you a summary

soraminazuki• 1 year ago

It's already locked up behind a login wall. You can only search for a handful of issues before being quickly rate limited.

hugh-avherald• 1 year ago

Isn't the entire purpose of Azure DevOps to be a sort of Jovian gravity well into which Microsoft marketing principles can be sucked into before they hit GitHub?

WorldMaker• 1 year ago

Hard for it to stay that way when Microsoft's own teams start dogfooding it. Evidence points to even the Windows Team using GitHub Issues as their primary PM tool today.

The saving grace for now seems to be that Microsoft sees the "Advanced" PM tools in GitHub as value adds and is either rolling them out slowly to charge "Preview Customers" for as long as possible for that for that feature before making it public and/or putting them into GitHub pricing tiers such as "If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it" and "Offer you cannot afford to refuse".

chrisjj2• 1 year ago

Free and unlimited

Extremely doubtful. The fact you haven't yet hit limits does not mean no limits.

Nor does the fact the provider claims unlimited.

simonw20• 1 year ago

There are repos out there with over a hundred thousand issues - https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20st... has 180,000+ now. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues?q=is%3Aissue is just over 100,000 across both open and closed.

I take a lot of notes but I don't think I'm going to end up with the largest issue collection on GitHub.

I could always spin up a second repo or org if I do run out. I have my notes scattered across several hundred repos (and a hunch of orgs) already.

chrisjj2• 1 year ago

There are repos out there with over a hundred thousand issues

Yet still, one more could hit the limit.

pmkary• 1 year ago

This is insane!

simonw20• 1 year ago

That's why I wrote this. The idea of using GitHub Issues as an alternative to a dedicated notes app is decidedly non-obvious. I only just realized myself that I've been using it that way for years.

dboreham• 1 year ago

I've been doing it for years (before GitHub existed...). e.g. https://github.com/dboreham/global-bugs/issues

cogogo• 1 year ago

I expected the first comment to be about privacy. I don’t keep a lot of notes but I definitely consider them even more private than even email. Not sure I want them training LLMs. Or are there actually assurances from MS around privacy for private repos?

fsflover• 1 year ago

Or are there actually assurances from MS around privacy for private repos?

Related discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36184948

simonw20• 1 year ago

The amount of extremely sensitive corporate secrets in GitHub issues makes me assume that their security and privacy are pretty rock solid.

A lot of companies pay GitHub a lot of money to look after their source code and related artifacts. That's GitHub's business model. I don't think they would jeopardize that trust for the sake of training a model on private data.

al_borland3• 1 year ago

Where I work we don’t use GitHub, but we do use Copilot. It took a long time before it was opened up for us to be able to use it, as deals had to be struck and accounts and auth setup to use our corporate logins, which have different rules for data privacy than public use of Copilot. We are explicitly forbidden from using the public version of Copilot, or any other AI for that matter.

I can only assume that companies paying for GitHub also pay for enhanced levels of privacy. Just because a company can pay GitHub not to train on their data, doesn’t mean they’re not going to train on your data that is being hosted for free. They are almost certainly crawling all free repos.

randallsquared• 1 year ago

I dunno. For one thing, those companies are paying GitHub a lot of money for the enterprise version, separately hosted (right?). The data isn't actually available to Microsoft employees or LLMs, absent some security flaw or backdoor. For another, companies that pay for this also (sample size is small, though) have automation that scans GitHub repos, issues, etc for any secrets and require them to be removed and scrubbed from history, implying that they don't trust even the self-hosted GitHub Enterprise as much as you do.

dcreater• 1 year ago

Assumptions are not sufficient when it comes to basic human rights. And my assumption is that they do or will use your data from their own interest as the likelihood that someone within Microsoft will benefit tends to 1 as time tends to infinity.

privacy needs to be verifiable (Apple has show this is possible with private cloud compute)

Sunspark• 1 year ago

I remember awhile back that they were and do train on repositories to the point that I never wanted to use GitHub for anything other than submitting bug reports to projects.

Maybe the non-training only applies if you pay protection money? But then you run into the whole if it's public there's nothing stopping some other AI that isn't MS from accessing the repository and training on it.

ravivyas• 1 year ago

the notes app... there is none.

There will always be better apps, but you need to stick to an app with its flaws and limitations.

I have been through this rabbit hole... (paid for Bear, IAWriter, noteplan, FSnotes and probably more that I forget) and have just stuck to local markdown files and use VS code ... I even used LLMs to generate a tiny plugin to solve my micro needs.

vijucat• 1 year ago

Unpopular opinion: developers obsess about the format being Markdown. This is completely backwards. This is a hammer-sees-nail thing. You should care more about the UX. And that somewhere, someone wrote a parser for the file format. That's it. You don't have to understand every byte of it. It need not be readable text and it need not be version-control friendly. It should be a joy to use, be powerful, be easy to annotate images and pdfs. I bet none of the Markdown solutions do this as elegantly as OneNote or alternatives.

simonw20• 1 year ago

The more time passes the more I care about my notes living in Markdown:

- I can transform it to other formats should I need to

- The GitHub variant of it (GFM) has feature like syntax highlighting for different languages which is incredibly useful to me based on the kinds of notes I take

- Diffing clearly genuinely is a benefit, sometimes I want to know exactly what I changed!

- I can parse it with regular expressions, so useful information doesn't end up locked in some weird binary format

- LLMs are great at reading and writing it

These things may not matter to people who are not nerds. I'm a nerd!

SOLAR_FIELDS2• 1 year ago

Indeed, Markdown has become a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts: You want to use it because the toolchain and ecosystem surrounding the format is good, and the toolchain and ecosystem are good because everyone is using it.

0xbadcafebee2• 1 year ago

sir, this is HN, nobody wants to hear your rational practical ideas

lawgimenez• 1 year ago

Almost the best notebook in the world, as long as there's no outage.

eviks• 1 year ago

It has excellent search

How is it excellent when current logs could do with a bit of redesign doesn't find the comment (requires quotes to find it)

And then a tiny typo "current logs could" do with a bit of redesing also fails you

sureIy• 1 year ago

Confirm. GitHub search is "search" not "excellent search"

joker99• 1 year ago

The fact that you can’t even specify the branch or search across branches is anything but excellent

__MatrixMan__4• 1 year ago

It's such a wasted opportunity too. It would be so powerful to understand how a tool is used by searching for popular repositories that are already using it.

bob1029• 1 year ago

For a typical organization, I think issues are still the most valuable part of the GitHub product stack. You can build very powerful project management abstractions on top of issues & labels.

If you have discipline to do a monorepo for the entire organization, your issue and code tabs are effectively the entire universe in one place. This is the only thing I've seen that can pull middle managers out of email - a single bucket that has everything of concern in it.

bgwalter• 1 year ago

Except if you lose your 2FA one day before you need your plans. Or are all plans public?

Any local notebook, including pencil and paper, is better.

simonw20• 1 year ago

Pencil and paper is terrible because you can lose the paper. I want my notes backed up to the cloud, with backups replicated across at least two continents.

I've experimented with a bunch of tools for extracting copies of my issues and pulling them down locally, which is easy thanks to the GitHub API.

One that's particularly fun is a GitHub Actions setup that copies the full contents of each issue thread into a file in the repo itself. Then I can "git pull" to fetch my backup!

I still don't have any of them running on a cron at home but I might set that up some day.

pier25• 1 year ago

Isn’t there something like Obsidian that uses GitHub instead?

OutOfHere• 1 year ago

For offline use, these were posted recently:

https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug

https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue

pacifika2• 1 year ago

How’s the mobile experience?

0xbadcafebee2• 1 year ago

The stuff that gets upvoted here...

Next up:

  - "SQLite is almost the best notebook in the world"
  - "Claude is almost the best notebook in the world"
  - "An SQLite database containing only Markdown files in a Git repo self-hosted on an SD card in my Raspberry Pi served by a Node.js web app accessible via 56k modem is almost the best notebook in the world"
  - "I created a startup to take the previous thing, reinvent GitHub Issues on top of it, call it AI Notes, and make almost the best notebook in the world, and it's now valued at $50B"

getsprite2• 1 year ago

Yeah absurd takes abound

simonw20• 1 year ago

This is fun: it turns out you can paste this GraphQL query:

  {
    viewer {
      issueComments {
        totalCount
      }
      issues {
        totalCount
      }
    }
  }

Into https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/overview/explorer in order to see the total number of issues and comments you've posted over your time on GitHub.

I got 9,413 issues and 39,087 comments, for a grand total of 48,500 combined!

AstroJetson• 1 year ago

I always wonder when I see all these best notebooks / note taking systems, etc. why people don't spin up any of the dozens of wiki servers.

You can put it online so you can get to it anywhere

You can run it off a stick to keep it with you (Tiddlywiki)

You can cross link pages to be able to collect things together

You can search. Some even have auto link builders so you can build a page of links to pages that match a category.

Some support Markup so you have formatting the way you want.

prepend4• 1 year ago

For me, I like to keep my life simple and not run servers unless I have to.

I haven’t run a wiki in years because markdown+git is good enough and simpler. I never really need anonymous edits.

bjornasm• 1 year ago

Councidentally I just started using it as my todo list. Its really neat, especially when using githubs cli gh.

paradox460• 1 year ago

Try it with ZenHub atop and it's so absurdly good it boggles the mind why anyone would use Jira

trenchgun• 1 year ago

Well... not everybody uses github, and not every task in Jira is about code in version control

yearesadpeople• 1 year ago

I've come to the same conclusion myself in the past 2 months (possibly driven by the AI / LLM age making me think even more in version control... writing those words make me wince). I have a small webapp too, which hoovers up issues I like to publish, from a repo with links on the web I like that I feel I would like to share (I believe the kids are calling this 'new age curation'). Its really quite a nice, organic, process. And its so odd its taken me 15 years of note apps - every other hot note app on the market - to realise this. Love Simon's articles, another nice insight

digdugdirk• 1 year ago

Interesting, do you have a repo for that webapp? Sounds interesting, I'd like to check it out.

zie• 1 year ago

Forgejo does almost everything Github does around issues that the OP mentioned(I think).

* It doesn't extract the title from the issue on bare linkes, instead the url will become something like: <group>/<repo>#15 Which isn't as nice. So issue #15 in repo tootie/mynotes would look like: tootie/mynotes#15

* It also doesn't do offline sync.

I think that's the only thing it doesn't do. I use Git Touch on iOS and it seems decent enough, you can get to issues and update them, etc.

The bonus is, assuming you run your own Forgejo, or trust whoever runs it for you(say Codeberg), you don't have the MS privacy concerns.

nivertech• 1 year ago

Years ago I was using GitHub Issues as my personal task manager

But ~ 2 years ago I switched to Obsidian for that

Eventually I event started used Obsidian for my project management, and ditched GitHub Issues / GitHub Projects

With caveats, that I use that for the greenfield project with lots of unstructured exploration + AI agents for keeping design docs and figuring out detailed tasks

For the established and legacy projects, I would probably use GitHub Issues for bugs, enhancement requests. And GitHub Projects for all reactive work (support, ops, bugs, etc.)

Lastly, I disagree that it's "almost the best notebook in the world". It my might be a best ticketing system or a note taking system, but not a notebook in the sense of Jupyter or LiveBook (but nothing stopping them to make code blocks executable[1], and even add some LLMs).

Also it's easy overwrite the content of the issue, even by a single person working from different tabs (at least that was the case in the past).

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1. GitHub Blocks

https://blocks.githubnext.com/

getsprite2• 1 year ago

I’m pretty sure you’ve never used any good issue tracking software then.

acquisitionsilk• 1 year ago

Step 1. Dev trusts Microsoft

Step 2. ...?

I don't mean to be facetious here. It's just that if GitHub doesn't end up going through the usual enshittification process, it'll be quite the anomaly.

Now, maybe it'll be an anomaly, exceptions to rules exist. But it just seems to be an endless cycle, trusting these companies, getting burnt, trusting again, getting burnt again. Is there no end to the cycle? Is there some new pressure on these companies to behave better that was not there before, and therefore we should all give them (yet) another chance?

I don't see why we would, personally. It even seems obvious to me that we shouldn't. Like in an abusive relationship, no matter the regret and the promises, eventually you've to say enough is enough, and ideally sooner rather than later. Nonetheless, it's very common practice for people who appear at least superficially like smart people to trust these companies a second, third, fourth time.

Either these apparently smart people know something I don't, or they like getting paid large amounts of money so much that they'll stay quiet and use the popular services and simply use their tech savvy to jump to a new thing quickly when the shit hits the fan. Or maybe I just prefer being cynical, and it's a personality thing. Someone, educate me here.

simonw20• 1 year ago

One of the main reasons I pick GitHub issues for this is that they have a very stable, reliable API that I can use to get my data back out again - or use to run continual automated exports, should I ever get around to doing that.

I wouldn't trust any system for my notes that doesn't have this.

GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world

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