This is going to be a rant. I'll earn it before the end.
Here is what set me off. Last Tuesday I spent forty minutes grooming a backlog that exactly one person will ever read. That person is me. I moved cards between columns, I set a priority field on each one, I dragged four of them into something my tool insisted on calling a sprint, and at no point in those forty minutes did I produce a line of code, a fixed bug, or a piece of information I did not already have in my head when I sat down.
I have run my product alone for over a year. For most of that year I kept reaching, by reflex, for the same category of software every team I ever worked on used to coordinate itself: the issue tracker. Jira, Linear, GitHub Issues, a Trello board with a tasteful column layout — the brand kept changing, the reflex did not. I want to talk about why that reflex is wrong for a solo dev, because it took me an embarrassingly long time to name what was bothering me.
What I was actually doing for forty minutes
Break down the ceremony of an issue tracker and almost every ritual in it exists to answer a question that a second person would ask.
