
Show HN: Trambar, a social space around your GitLab project - chung-leong
https://trambar.io/
======
chung-leong
The project website of Trambar is rather oddball. I couldn’t come up with
something more conventional. You see, it’s hard to write promotional materials
for a tool that doesn’t solve any particular pressing problem. “A place of
programmers to hang out when they got nothing better to do” isn’t much of a
pitch. But that’s what Trambar basically is. It combines the GitLab activity
log with—well, random stuff that users submit.

Here’s how I imagine the typical usage scenario: A programmer is on a train,
returning home after a hard day at work. He opens the Trambar app on his phone
and quickly flips through the events of the day…

“I check these fixes into git. Yay me.”

“Tom did something to the backend code. Okay.”

“Oh, my manager liked my push! That’s nice.”

“Look what Kate had for lunch...”

“Here’s the TODO list I made this morning. Let’s see...check...check...”

“CAT VIDEO!”

Trambar is sort of modeled after Facebook. The critical difference is that you
run the software. You’re in control of your data. No one’s going to monitor
what your team is saying and then bombard with targeted adverts.

The aim of Trambar is modest: to make the lives of programmers slightly
happier. For the price of a pizza (the cost of hosting the app at a cloud
provider), you can raise your work morale by just a little bit. That’s the
bottom line.

I hope the website manages to convey the idea behind the software. My apology
in advance if anyone is offended by my strange sense of humor. The whole thing
was put together under the influence. I blame the beer.

