Fizzy (Kanban tool from 37 Signals)

Tools
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A new tool from 37 signals:

UI seems very well done!

Source is available so you can self-host:

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I’m very interested in Fizzy. I’m hesitant to try their free tier with 1000 cards before needing a paid account, but I think that fear is just due to past experiences with other cloud providers. That Fizzy’s docs say you can easily take your data and move it from their cloud to your own instance (and vice versa) should remove my fears of lock-in to a paid service.

I’ve been using Trello for my own kanban needs and some work-related needs for about a decade now. It has worked very well, but it has SO MANY more features and functionality that I just don’t need now. And Atlassian seem quite good at ruining everything they buy, so I totally expect Trello to continue to decline.

Now that I have a Wireguard VPN setup at home and the office and DNS for my main domain (hosted by Cloudflare but using private IPv4 addresses) I should probably give Fizzy a shot. Then if I really like it, setup a container to self-host it. Maybe this will be the impetus I need to properly setup home hosting and proper backups, as something like Fizzy I would definitely want to have backups of…

3

I have also used Trello for years on some projects. It is a step up in UI from Jira. But I really dislike the recent Trello UI change that forces comments to be in a squished column to the right of the description. Even if you display the browser in full screen, the card view remains a narrow pop-up in the middle of the screen. This really limits the amount of detailed information you can put in a comment.

Good UI is important in apps like this if we expect people to use them for their own notes system while doing work, rather than some obligatory bureaucratic requirement. And this is really the only way for tools like this to be really useful, which is if they are tightly integrated into a developer’s personal workflow, as well as the team. A good tool is both, and the number one requirement is good/fast UI.

I’ve had success deploying a rails app to a Linode recently using Kamal – pretty slick stuff. I used my Gitea instance as Docker image host, so Kamal creates a container of your app, pushes it to your registry, then pulls it on the target machine. A few notes:

I use Caddy on this server, so had to disable the proxy:

# Deploy to these servers.
servers:
  web:
    hosts:
      - app.hfid.org
    options:
      publish:
        - "3000:3000"  # Expose port 3000 for Caddy to proxy
    proxy: false  # Disable kamal-proxy since we're using Caddy

And SQLite for the database:

# Use persistent storage volume for SQLite database
# The database is stored in storage/ directory, not db/
# The db/ directory contains migrations and should come from the Docker image
volumes:
  - "hfid_storage:/rails/storage"

More on deploying Fizzy to come …

4

I will use your instance