When I was less experienced, I despised Jira with an intensity that I didn't hesitate to express. My hatred burned with religious fervor, reaching such heights that my team lead once wrote on the whiteboard: "X days since [my-name] swore at Jira," promising pizza for the entire team if we reached two weeks. That pizza never materialized.
Eventually, I came to a realization that would shift my perspective entirely. Throughout my career, there would be countless hills to die on - tools, programming languages, ideas, and techniques that I simply couldn't avoid. While I couldn't control their presence, I could control my approach to them.
Jira deserves its criticism for legit reasons. The UI lacks intuitive flow, it's non-linear, keyboard navigation is cumbersome, simple tasks require clicking and clicking more, checking status or looking up information become unnecessarily complex.
But then, "a problem cannot be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.", right? So, instead of fighting the tool, I decided to minimize my interaction with its problematic interface. I've found go-jira, a CLI tool that transformed my work. I even developed custom integrations for my editor¹, so I can do thing even faster. Ping me if you're an Emacs user, I'll show you. Now I can search through Jira efficiently, hover over ticket references like SAC-12345 in my notes and quickly get a ticket description, instantly convert that text into a shareable URL for teammates, etc.
Don't just hate things blindly - do something about it, find workarounds.
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¹ https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/blob/main/modules/custom/ji...
nonconstant•6mo ago
Bring on those missing Ruby SDKs and Active Record drivers!
And join us at the San Francisco Ruby conference in November (sorry for self-promotion but I’m very happy to see this).