GitHub Issues-only project management

Tom MacWright:

I started my career at Development Seed, and was part of the team that spun out and became Mapbox. And back in the day, everything was GitHub issues.

• The company internal blog was an issue-only repository. Blog posts were issues, you’d comment on them with comments on issues.
• Sales deals were tracked with issue threads.
• Recruiting was in issues - an issue per candidate.
• All internal project planning was tracked in issues.

Development Seed still uses GitHub Issues almost exclusively to manage the day to day operations.

It works because GitHub has everything you need to plan work and see what’s moving from different angles, even for complex projects with several people working in the team. Project leads use Kanban-style project boards to see where tickets are in the pipeline. Milestones are ideal for planning and tracking sprints. For personal to-do lists, a list of tickets assigned to you, you create custom views of your work using filters, unique URLs to bookmark included.

I never understood the appeal of heavy-handed project-management software. If your code already lives in GitHub, you might as well save some money and use GitHub’s project management tooling.