Accepting Insanity¶

The short of it is that I was fed up with all the tools out there. Ticket tracking wasn’t working well enough. Wiki’s lacked a decent structure, and I was always changin what structure I had created. Word processors are a nightmare. I won’t subject myself to MS Project [1]. Text files crate unmanageble sprawl. However, the biggest reason for my dissastisfaction was that web browsers suck for data entry. Espcially structured textual data.

I’m a vim user. I like vim, I’m comfortable with vim, and, while not an expert, I’m pretty handy when it comes to text manipulation. I can easily cut and paste, indent whole blocks of text, create macros to repeatedly perform some operation, etc. and I don’t have to use the mouse. Emacs will do all this for you too. A web browser won’t (neither will most word processores). I am also dealing with lots of code, config files, command line entries, etc. Text editors were made for this stuff.

I’m a git user. Again, I’m not a powerful git user, but I know enough to semi-effective. Git is wonderful at merging changes from different locations. Additionally, since it’s a DVCS, I don’t need access to the server in order to save changes and revisions. Using gitosis <http://scie.nti.st/2007/11/14/hosting-git-repositories-the-easy-and-secure-way> I can have a central repository that acts as my backup and canonical copy. This makes it easy for me to update projects and tasks on my workstation or laptop, regardless of where I am or what kind of connection I have.

I also like the expressiveness of ReST and the nice documents sphinx <http://sphinx.pocoo.org> creates.

So, in summary, the reasons I chose to use ReST and Git for project and task managemnt are:

• Vim [2] is better than any web browser for text entry
• Git provides:
  • Anywhere access: different machines and operating systems
  • Acts as a backup
  • Has hooks for publishing locally or “publicly” on commit / push
• Sphinx creates pretty docs
• ReST is easy enough to learn and clear enough to read “un-rendered”
• ReST documents provide the flexibilty and formatting to producs good project and task documentaiton.

Footnotes