HuBoard

GitHub issues made awesome

[huboard]

GitHub Projects!

It's GitHub Universe here in San Fransico and GitHub has just announced a huge new feature called "Projects".

What are projects?

I think GitHub explains it best here.

What does this mean for HuBoard?

Only good things! We have been in close contact with GitHub staff since the early stages of this feature. Our team has had the amazing opportunity to offer our thoughts on the formation of the backing API as well.

Ultimately this will lead to a faster, more stable HuBoard experience.

For the short term, you can check out our experimental demo. This a highly work-in-progress, read-only "Projects Board". My hope is in the coming days/weeks to get feedback what YOU would like to see in terms of how we work alongside GitHub Projects.

Join the discussion here: https://github.com/huboard/huboard/issues/688

OR tweet, ping us in-app, or email us

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[huboard]

Fresh new look!

One of the comments I encountered most talking to users this year has been that HuBoard's cards are dated, and don't provide the information that they need.

Our team took this to heart, and in May began the groundwork required to make some really big changes to the way HuBoard looks and feels.

In June we tested the waters with the milestones board, allowing the columns to be scroll amoung other things. The resulting positive feedback encouraged we were moving in the right direction.

Today I'm happy to annouce the larger phase of this update! Here are some things to look out for on your boards:

Task board

Cards on your task board have been improved in the following ways:

Comment counts, parent repositories, and multiple assignee support have all been included

References to the issue are now displayed as trays beneath the card (clicking on them opens up the referenced issue!)

Card states (ready/blocked/closed/archived) are also now displayed as trays beneath the card

By popular demand, your labels are now always visible on the card

Card references are something I am really excited about personally, the team has a lot of ideas to build and improve on this feature in the near future!

We have also made the task board columns scrollable!

Milestone board

Milestone cards have also been improved:

Elements are now more compact

The column progress meter now reflects the relative movement of a card towards the final column, versus it's current column. For boards with many columns this keeps the meter from getting too big.

Multiple Assignee support has been added

Labels

Another popular request, blocked/ready labels are now recognized as states. This means that blocked & ready issues can now be filtered on your board via the label, and also populate your issue/PR timeline!

Filters

Filters are smarter! When filtering on assignee or labels, only the selected label/assignee is visible on the card:

Go take a look!

Check out HuBoard's HuBoard for a live demo of all the changes!

Thoughts? Feedback? We would love to hear what you think of these changes. tweet, ping us in-app, or email us

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[huboard]

Scrollable columns on Milestones!

Before we dive in...

Earlier this year we asked our users to rate if they would recommend HuBoard to a friend or colleague. The results were very valuable! Not because we scored high or low, but instead it's because I received dozens of emails full of extremely well thought-out feature requests, bug reports, & great ideas.

Compiling and digesting all this data took some time (Ryan and I were in the middle of Techstars Cloud 2016). The majoriy of it can be condensed into two themes:

UX Polish, especially around columns and cards

Performance, slow switching between tabs & missing events

Since then, we have stabilized the board state considerably (better coverage of events from GitHub, real-time board sync), added support for issue templates, & many other various tweaks and fixes.

I'm excited to share that today we are releasing a whole suite of additional changes and improvements that have been in the works for some time, this is just the beginning of many UX upgrades on the way over the coming months:

Scrollable columns

To start with, scrolling on individual milestone columns has been enabled! Conducting a planning meeting on HuBoard from the milestones tab on a board with many cards has been a painful experience in the past (you find a card and drag it into a column you can't see for instance). Our new scrolling behavior improves this workflow immensely.

Horizontal scrolling

For projects with more milestones than can fit on the screen...

Progress 'Power Bar'

Reducing card size on milestones has been a frequent request, this is just the first step. We have replaced the breadcrumbs with a more compact 'Power Bar’.

Milestone tab performance

Switching to milestones can take a long time. The render speed of the milestones tab has been greatly improved.

IE & Edge browsers

This will be a work in progress, but we have improved HuBoard support for Microsoft browsers.

Thats all for now!

There is much more in the works, take a look at our high level roadmap here to get an idea of whats next!

Check out HuBoards milestones for a live demo of the changes!

Thoughts? Feedback? We would love to hear what you think of these changes. tweet, ping us in-app, or email us

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[huboard]

HuBoard and Techstars Cloud 2016

Some exciting news

Hi Everyone!

As promised last month, HuBoard has some great news to share... We have officially joined the Techstars Cloud 2016 program!

What is Techstars?

To quote their Splash Page:

Techstars is a global ecosystem that helps entrepreneurs build great businesses

The program lasts for 90 days (starting this week), during which our team will have the tremendous opportunity to meet with many prospective mentors and investors.

Why Techstars?

It's been two years since HuBoard officially "launched" with paid plans for both User and Organization private GitHub repos. Along with HuBoard Enterprise, this has enabled us to make many great improvements and changes - and to dedicate fulltime resources to an app originally birthed as a side project.

All this growth has been both energizing and humbling, but has also presented all the challenges that come bundled with developing a new business.

Realizing that reaching the "next level" would mean also pushing our skillsets to a new high, Ryan Rauh (CEO and founder of HuBoard) turned his attention towards attracting the assistance of a world class startup accelerator.

Making a long story short, this journey lead us to the Techstars Cloud program in San Antonio, TX. We feel the combination of exceptional mentorship, a cloud focus, and an initial Seed makes Techstars Cloud 2016 the right fit.

What does this mean for HuBoard?

Only good things! Our goal is to bump our team size up and start shipping some of the bigger features users are asking for. Examples would be providing useful data about how boards are being used, along with improved performance on initial board loading on our back end!

Stay tuned! We will be posting regular updates about our time here at Techstars and all the cool things we will be learning to make HuBoard better!

[huboard]

End-of-Summer Update

Greetings! It's been a busy end-of-summer for HuBoard this year, I would like to share some of the "goings on" here for the past couple of months.

Closed Issues

After many (very legitimate) requests for us to sharpen up our closed issues workflow, I am happy to annouce we have taken the first step! You will notice the following changes to your board:

All closed issues from the past two weeks will now appear in the final column (even those closed from GitHub)

Dragging a closed issue from the final column to any other column will prompt to either reopen that issue, or cancel

Issues closed from GitHub should now appear in the final column

Unfortunately due to some ambiguity in our previous scheme, theres a good chance a few previously archived issues will reappear. (sorry about any madness this causes in your final columns!!)

We plan to follow up this release with a mechanism to link PR's to issues on the board, which is another popular request in the backlog.

Health Checking

As GitHub is ramping down support for Service Hooks, HuBoard has been working on support for native webhooks. The trick is, if the repos on your board do not have the required webhooks enabled - HuBoard can't keep your data in sync with GitHub. Enter our new Health Checking module!

Notifies you when a Webhook is broken

Gives you the ability to fix it

Because GitHub permissions vary between users, we feel this is the best way to guarantee your board will get the configuration it needs to run optimally.

Model Refactors

Since bumping the app up to Ember v1.13.8, @rauhryan and I had a conversation about HuBoards current level of technical debt - which concluded in a decision to refactor our client-side modeling before any more features would be shipped.

Building a fully featured GitHub integration can be quite challenging. Besides the initial (and API costly) stitching together of an initial board state, HuBoard also needs to do its best to keep track of changes from GitHub itself, and other HuBoard users.

Remodeling our subscriber/message queue, along with the client data model gave us just the kind of flexibilty we were looking for. Now when an issue is created for a linked repo from another HuBoard the connected users boards are able to effortlessy recreate the linked issue and place it right where its supposed to go! (only one small example of many optimizations)

This summer was a blast, but there is much more to come. Stay tuned for some really exciting news in the coming month(s)!!

[huboard]

Time to speed things up!

My first post

Hey I'm Ricki - Ryan (HuBoard Founder/MadScientist/CEO) brought me onto the team fall of 2014. I work remotely from Canada, and have thoroughly enjoyed my time collaborating with the HuBoard team. While I spend my time developing primarily, I also have the opportunity to lend a hand in support, marketing, and the community aspects of HuBoard as well.

5 Second page renders...

We use Ember.js to manage our frontend, at the time rendering our columns using Ember.Collection.View. Each Collection View in turn rendering its cards based on the backing model (array of GitHub issues).

This worked for smaller boards - that is, boards with less than a couple hundred cards. As card numbers creeped towards the thousands however, we began to receive complaints about 4-5 second page renders! (that and some weird bugs with cards dissapearing from columns) It was time to make some changes.

Ember 1.13 and Glimmer

I spiked out an experimental app (at Ryans suggestion) using the Ember 1.13 beta, focusing only on rendering draggable cards in columns. Our hope was that Glimmer, embers new rendering engine, would live up to its promise of improved render/re-rendering with arrays.

tl;dr : This led me down quite the rabbit hole as I worked around a massive clash of frameworks, Glimmer vs. Jquery Sortable. Ember 1.13 marks a deprecation of the view layer in favour of ember components. I built a column component initialized with an array of issues. Then rendered a sorted list of those issues as card components. Each column component instance was mixed in with a "sortable" mixin that would attach its element to a jquery sortable list, which is how we manage dragging and dropping cards. The "clash of frameworks" happens as card elements are dragged around the DOM, Glimmer goes insane and no longer renders cards according to the backing array. This caused DOM elements being forced into detached states and dissapearing from the columns, and a myriad of other strange behaviours. (I probably need to detail this whole experience, and how I resolved it in a seperate blog post)

The Good Stuff

Ok! The HuBoard/ember-1.13 spike seems to work, time to port it to the main app and upgrade ember. Fair warning - if your app relies on many views who in turn render more views, this is going to be a tedious and time consuming process!!

Here is the improvement we are seeing on a very large board:

Initial Board renders for columns/cards in Milliseconds

Thats a 30% bump! (I captured the benchmark data from the Ember chrome inspector) While we would still like to cut the render time for large boards even further, I think this is a good start!

[huboard]

0.5.17-beta Update Released

The 0.5.17-beta release is now available for download from https://enterprise.huboard.com/download.

f46a69...14b59e

The release notes 0.5.17-beta follow:

New Features

#385 Adding no milestone in the milestone list of the filter panel

#343 UI for Linked board management

Personal token authentication support

#336 Adds linked repos to the filter list

Realtime Improvements

Fixes performance regression caused by persistent connection not closing (RealTime)

Upgrades nginx to version 1.6.2

Adds support for websockets, eventsource, and long-polling

reduces number of open sockets to the server from n* to only 1

Bug Fixes

Fixes avatar issue because the GitHub API has deprecated gravatar_id

Handles edge case where the browsers sends a nil array of labels

[huboard]

Viewing multiple repos on one HuBoard

We've redesigned our repository settings section to make room for some big improvements we are working on.

The newest addition to our new and improved settings page is Links. Viewing multiple repos on one board is an amazing feature of HuBoard that we have supported for over 2 years now. Today we are making it fast and easy for you to combine and configure your HuBoard to get an aggregate view of your project.

The only requirement to link a repository together is that each linked HuBoard has the same number of columns. Links are meant to be used with a parent/child relationship in mind. For example HuBoard is split into a couple of different repositories rauhryan/huboard and rauhryan/huboard-pubsub and about 80% of development work occurs in the main HuBoard repository. Once in a while we need to fix bugs or add features to our pubsub service, with Links any new issues added to the pubsub project automatically show up on my main board for HuBoard! #awesome #enjoy

[huboard]

We are happy to announce that all text areas now have @mention and :emoji: support.

Thanks for all the great suggestions and for using HuBoard!

Sincerely yours,

The HuBoard Team

[huboard]

Hello World

Hello first post