busybee fluffy rambles

The various responses I’ve gotten to yesterday’s post tell me that I need to be a bit more specific about what I mean by a “project,” because how it relates to my work is very different than how the various project-tracking tools do it.

Project-tracking tools think of a project as being a distinct set of work items, often shared by an entire team, going for a single end-goal deliverable. The tasks for a single project live on the project’s own board, and they do not intermingle.

However, in my situation, I am making music for a whole bunch of separate projects (external to me and my own planning), but which I want to all have visible in a single place. Some of these projects might only need one track. Some of them might need a dozen or so.

Hey! As I’m trying to get more serious about my music contracting stuff, I’m looking for a better way of managing my projects and requests and so on.

Here’s the criteria I’m going for:

• Self-hostable (and ideally free)

  I do not want to be beholden to someone company’s capricious whims about the future of their exponential growth platform.

• Public vs. private vs. shareable items

  It would be super useful for me to be able to link to a page which tells people how much work I have pending and also maybe be able to designate items as whether the public can see the specifics.

  Having a means of letting people also see progress on their specific items would be great, but not a requirement.

  I definitely need to be able to make some specifics or even the project/task names hidden to the public, but I still want people to be able to see that there is something going on even if they don’t know what.

• Nested items and/or project groupings

  When working on music, I want to be able to see what work needs to be done on a per-project basis, but also be able to see what work needs to be done in general. Ideally this would be a “containment” concept (i.e. sub-tasks of a larger task) and not a “relation” concept. Which is to say, there needs to be actual hierarchy.

• Freeform text entry for projects and tasks

  Usually client requests come with a whole bunch of information that needs to be browseable, and keeping it associated with the request itself would be stellar.

• Kanban view

  Being able to see the tasks in terms of a pending/in progress/delivered/complete view where I can move stuff from left to right as it progresses would be super helpful.

  Ideally things in the “complete” column would automatically age out.

• Priorities and due dates

  Sometimes a task has to get done by a certain time. Sometimes a task is a “nice to have.” Sometimes a task is just a placeholder for what work might eventually need to happen.

Hey y'all, just a reminder that I have an upcoming show happening on Friday at around 2:30 PM Pacfic time (5:30 Eastern, 22:30 UTC, etc.).

Hey y'all! February is here! Oh gosh!

My big thing this month will be making as much music as I can for Strawberry Jam. February and November are my two big music-making months (November being when I do Novembeat normally, although this year it was taken up with other things).

I’m also hoping to do a second season of Transformative Meditations, also for Strawberry Jam.

I also have a couple of concerts lined up, one tomorrow and one next Friday.

As I mentioned on Mastodon and Bluesky, my gaming PC got infected by malware/ransomware, particularly Azov and Expiro. I’m not sure how my computer got infected but this was the push I needed to switch it over to Linux, now that VRChat and SteamVR run pretty well on Linux anyway.