Problem

As someone with a stake in the outcome of the Rails World project, I keep tabs on the standup updates. These are actually a primary viewport for me into the state of the project, what each person is working towards, how things are going.

Once I read an update, I have a few thoughts I often want to share with a particular user’s about their update:

• I’ve seen it, I love it, seems like you’re on track, keep going!
• I’ve seen it, I think you should do X instead of Y, or I want to nudge them in a slightly different direction

I also find myself thinking about gaps in the current version:

• I can’t react with celebration, thinking, heart, or some other emoji
• I don’t know when each person fills out their update, I have to proactively check throughout the day (or I forget and it slips to tomorrow)
• I can’t easily see a list of who has joined the project

Lastly, team members get value out of reading other team member’s posts:

1. Cross pollination
2. Transparency can be a serious accelerant

The worst case scenario plays out something like this: I wake up on a Tuesday morning and check my calendar. I see very little activity in the discord channel for a project. I know we have an important client demo on Thursday (48 hours from now). I have no idea where the project’s at, what each person is working on, how it’s going, so I post a panicked discord message. This gives the team anxiety, erodes their trust in my leadership, and applies undue pressure.

Appetite

Medium batch (~4 weeks)

Solution

I propose a few new features and some tweaks to existing features to solve all of these problems.

1. Rich Text
   1. Updates should be rich text, so that they can support links, images, attachments, and so forth