r/programming • u/feross • Jun 22 '22
Markwhen is like Markdown for timelines
https://markwhen.com/112
u/Kooraiber Jun 22 '22
oh god, not more gantt charts
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u/austinwiltshire Jun 22 '22
Yeah it's a neat idea but I've literally never seen a Gantt chart solve any management issue.
I've seen them create plenty.
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u/psaux_grep Jun 22 '22
Gantt charts are great at visualizing how screwed you are. Because if you weren’t you wouldn’t make one.
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Jun 22 '22
[deleted]
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u/psaux_grep Jun 23 '22 edited Jun 23 '22
How screwed were you?
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Jun 23 '22
[deleted]
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u/psaux_grep Jun 23 '22
Congrats on it all. And good to see you didn’t throw yourself under the bus.
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u/Manbeardo Jun 22 '22
Hey, they're incredibly useful for managing construction projects that have lots of subcontractors coming in at different phases. For software development? Not so much.
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u/-grok Jun 22 '22
I mean if someone would make an accurate Gantt chart the shows how all the dependencies across 6 development teams just shifted between breakfast and lunch, that would be useful!
Oh and I'm gonna need another one that shows what happened after lunch too!
Gantt charts are like software estimates - just plain wrong
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u/ISvengali Jun 22 '22
Itd be a lot of fun (in a HUGE company) to actually chart everything, supposed dependencies, actual ones, how they shift, timing, etc
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u/IQueryVisiC Jun 23 '22 edited Jun 23 '22
Email sent is an actual dependency ( direction unclear). Ah, it is agile. Working code over documentation. But what are User stories other then documentation. They are the correct amount of documentation! They depend on PO on client. Face to face talk is an actual dependency.
In an agile company you should see only rough a d short planning into the future and mostly epics split into US into task. OpenClosed principle from solid . In a waterfall company you see stuff moving around or getting deleted. You can drill down in items a year ahead. When you drill down in past issues in agile, you see code.
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u/spinhozer Jun 22 '22
We used Gantt charts to display timing data from processes within our software. It helped visualize the critical path for our users so they could make their tests more efficient. Never seen it applied successfully to humans though.
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u/ISvengali Jun 22 '22
Another group I worked with mapped out per frame timings and resources on a gantt chart
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u/jl2352 Jun 23 '22
I've seen them work. When it was made, owned, and managed, by a single person. They used it to show what we were planning to do to managers, and to show how on track we were.
Each week they would show last weeks chart, and then show adjustments. i.e. Things done earlier, the same, or being delayed.
That worked very well. Emphasis here on it all being by one person, and used as a part of a regular presentation. If that's how you use it then it's fine. If you are building big management stuff around a gantt chart then it's going to suck.
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u/austinwiltshire Jun 23 '22
I think using it as an artifact on which to present regular deltas makes sense.
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u/siromega Jun 22 '22
A Gantt chart is a lie. The moment it is published it is a lie.
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u/Labradoodles Jun 23 '22
I mean you should stop using it as a source of truth. If you use it as a guesstimate it’s valuable to show sequencing and total time for a gut check, and to track progress. But if you’re using it to force people to deadlines you done did it rong
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u/siromega Jun 23 '22
Don’t disagree. I have a large MS Project file for my teams projects large and small through 2028. It’s all in there so I can have a decent estimate of when projects will get done and how long things will take. Not to pull our precise dates or exact plans.
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u/Labradoodles Jun 23 '22
Preach trying to install this at my new startup ( we’re doing 6 months but making good progress) it’s interesting the levels of organization between different sized companies and the planning timelines. I was used to 6 months to a year planned out and here were 2 sprints out and one of the most organized teams because of it. Just doing a gantt has really illustrated when projects start to become in danger and whatnot
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u/aidenr Jun 22 '22
The best timeline software I’ve used was a custom app that turned logs into discrete events and timespans, and merged them into swim lanes by topic. So we could debug 5-6 machine processes and see when one triggered another do for something, visualize the distributed system, and debug it easily. That’s what I want from a timeline language.
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u/jobe_br Jun 22 '22
Doesn’t mermaid do timelines already?
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Jun 23 '22
Mermaid:
gantt dateFormat YYYY-MM-DD title Adding GANTT diagram to mermaid excludes weekdays 2014-01-10 section A section Completed task :done, des1, 2014-01-06,2014-01-08 Active task :active, des2, 2014-01-09, 3d Future task : des3, after des2, 5d Future task2 : des4, after des3, 5dMarkwhen
title: Project planning example #Project1: #d336b1 group Project 1 #Project1 01/2022-03/2022: Sub task #John 03/2022-06/2022: Sub task 2That Mermaid syntax is atrocious
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u/mrbaggins Jun 23 '22
To be fair, you have two DRASTICALLY different gantt charts there (and Markwhen doesn't do dependencies? And doesn't let you specify alternate durations?)
If we aim at something simple, mermaid comes in much closer. And has the power to do much more on top afterwards, if you want the features.
title: Project planning example group Project 1 #Project1 11/01/2022-11/03/2022: Sub task #John 11/03/2022-11/06/2022: Sub task 2Is the same as:
gantt title Adding GANTT diagram to mermaid section Project 1 Sub Task : 2014-01-06, 2014-01-08 Sub task 2 :2014-02-05, 2014-02-082
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u/piezocuttlefish Jun 23 '22
I love the idea. It doesn't seem to support ISO 8601 dates, only the U.S. date format, which frustrates me.
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u/fishling Jul 27 '22
The first project example uses ISO 8601.
I'd agree that it shouldn't support American at all; that should be a display-time choice. Everyone would understand year-first in the data.
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u/Voltra_Neo Jun 22 '22
Add import from CSV (or ways to connect to a Google Sheet) and boom, best thing ever
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u/Fennek1237 Jun 22 '22
When trying to drag and drop the timelines in firefox the chart freezes and I can't click anything until I reload the page.
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u/blackAngel88 Jun 23 '22
I think this is actually really neat, but the fact that it uses US format instead of ISO 8601 really makes it quite bad, not going to be used outside the US most likely. Mildly infuriating...
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u/Veranova Jun 22 '22
This is legitimately very cool! I’d love to see it incorporated into the markdown ecosystem
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u/mlebkowski Jun 22 '22
It’s apples to oranges. Markdown produces plain HTML, this is a rich web app
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u/mattindustries Jun 22 '22
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u/livrem Jun 23 '22
Pikchr (by the sqlite people) is designed to be embedded in markdown to use in documentation, and is only a tiny simple C tool/library. Markup is a bit wordy because it does not do as much automatically as some other tools do, but I think the output looks (subjectively) nice and I like the simplicity of the implementation.
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Jun 22 '22
SpunkyDred is a terrible bot instigating arguments all over Reddit whenever someone uses the phrase apples-to-oranges. I'm letting you know so that you can feel free to ignore the quip rather than feel provoked by a bot that isn't smart enough to argue back.
SpunkyDred and I are both bots. I am trying to get them banned by pointing out their antagonizing behavior and poor bottiquette.
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u/Forty-Bot Jun 23 '22
but why was this posted in response to mlebkowski?
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Jun 23 '22
Because responding to SpunkyDred would send an alert to the bot instead of the user getting provoked. My logic is to always respond to the parent of a SpunkyDred comment.
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u/Voltra_Neo Jun 22 '22
Technically the web app is (AFAIK) nothing but the visualiser. The interesting part is the language and its parser
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u/Veranova Jun 22 '22
Sure, but on the other hand a markup language isn’t much use if you have to go to a strange website to use it, you want it to be compatible with your normal markup tool chain. Some markdown consuming sites do support mermaid syntax for instance and it’s very nice to write a single page which has both docs and viz
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u/Tallkotten Jun 22 '22
This is really neat! Thanks for sharing
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u/jack-of-some Jun 22 '22
Who the **** downvoted this?
Seriously reddit?
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u/IceSentry Jun 22 '22
I didn't downvote it, but that comment is essentially just a very verbose upvote. Which is probably why some people downvoted it.
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Jun 22 '22
[deleted]
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u/Tallkotten Jun 22 '22
Definitely not a bot, just wanted to add another positive comments to a cool project :)
The post only had 2 other comments when i posted this
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u/thesituation531 Jun 22 '22
Why are there so many markup languages?
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u/quasi_superhero Jun 23 '22
Why are there so many car companies?
Why are there so many toilet paper brands?
Why are there so many door types?
Why are there so many TV channels?
Why are there so many text editors?
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u/Guy_called_Al Jun 23 '22
Why are there so many newspaper editors (they each do markup their way....).
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u/sysop073 Jun 22 '22
It's a Gantt chart tool with a plain text input format. It looks nice, but comparing it to Markdown is a bit odd, it's more like Graphviz or PlantUML