Ask HN: What do you use to keep track of a backlog on solo projects?
How do you keep track of a backlog/roadmap when building something solo? Do you find that it is even helpful to do so at all?
yes, helpful. I need to prioritize the issues.
Sometimes I get unmotivated on my project. I found setting a concrete and small goal and focus on the goal can help me make progress. I force myself to check off 3 bugs on the bug board everyday.
Backlog is good when multiple developers are working on a project because it can make tasks assignable and prevent overlap of work. But in a solo endeavor, keeping a backlog tend to become a mere formality that slows one down.
I guess my claim depends on the complexity of the project, but I think complexity of project that one developer can handle might be limited such that keeping a backlog is not really worth the effort.
For long-term ones, I use TODO notes scattered around my Rails codebase. I have segmented those items into 3 categories: high, medium, and low. Whenever I create a new TODO note, I append one of those categories to it (e.g. TODO[low]).
Rails has a built-in command that displays all those items (`rails notes`). To filter items by the category, I pipe the output from that command to ripgrep:
rails notes | rg -S lowI have a public board that's a hybrid between kanban and idea board. You can see it here: