Unscalable Agile Framework for Personal Projects

UnSaFe - I’ll soon be selling a 5 day onsite training course that will allow you too certify your own personal project as UnSaFe. The Good news is that to maintain this certification you’ll have to renew every year for large sums of money.

Snark over. I apologise for it, but sometimes it bubbles up when I should be in better control. Over the years I have tried a multitude of ways to keep track of personal projects. Basecamp, Trello, Github Issues, paper, iOS based apps, macOS based apps. Nothing was as frictionless and easy to maintain as a markdown checklist in the README. I think in the end it felt too much like work. There is the cost of maintaining the tool, sometimes financial sometimes time. There is a benefit to imitating work for side projects - but here this didn’t make me feel inclined to work on projects.

I find that having the task list as part of the code reduces any friction in maintaining it. It does mean that there can be several versions as branching occurs, but git sorts this out in the end. I tend to add feature tasks in the task branch, and new ones in the main branch. The list can be broken up into various sections. For this site I have Launch To Do as a section, along with the main body of tasks. Tasks themselves are simply one liners, no need for detailed user stories or acceptance criteria here - remember we’re UnSaFe. Invariably as I start to work on tasks, then more work is discovered, this normally takes the form of indented items. However is it is a related item it gets added to the main list with some common identifier for the feature, such as posts page - add title image.

Prioritisation of items can be done by simply moving the lines around in the list. In fact when I come to tend to my little projects, I often start by reorganising the task list. Then promptly pick one that I feel like doing that probably isn’t the most important. Done tasks tend to end up at the bottom of the task list, to act as a reminder of the greatness that has been achieved over the years.

For me this has been the most sustainable method of keeping track of intended work on side projects. Once again proving the utility of a simple text file. Maybe I could move this to a better place UnSaFe.mdor probably TASKS.md.