
Show HN: Hacksboard – A Pull Request Tracking Tool for Your TV - davebcn87
https://hacksboard.com/
======
dogma1138
Why is this a "service" and not a standalone app for AppleTV/Chromecast/Webkit
TV's? Giving a 3rd party access to your github even to list the repo's isn't
something that many companies will do lightly, not to mention that many
companies might self host git or use an alternative service.

Also the site could really use some information about what the hell does the
app do exactly, it shows pull requests that i can get, but some information
about the process, and what features they have to actually facilitate it might
actually be well useful for some one that wants to figure out if this is even
worth evaluating.

I really don't get all these "app" sites lately, they pretty much only tease
you in the hopes you'll bit and if you've invested more time in testing them
out than you would normally want too you'll stick with them.

What happened to online-demos, couple of hour of video and actual manual and
whitepapers being available? I really pity analysts and ISM guys these days
that need to do some market research to find products that might meet their
needs.

[EDIT] It looks like they require R/W access to everything, including code,
settings, and deployment keys, GL getting that approved at any organization
past the incubator phase that cares even slightly about security and or
compliance. While they admit that this is excessive and is mainly due to
limitations on GitHub's side (I'm not familiar enough with how permissions
work on Github outside of their enterprise integrated SSO auth), but still
seems that this is something that they should've solved using middleware or
anything other solution that gives their customers actual control over what
they could do with their repo. R/W access to code and deploy keys will simply
not fly in any regulated sector.

~~~
arol
Hi I'm Arol, one of the creators of Hacksboard. Thank you for all your
feedback on this, we appreciate it so much!

Hacksboard was born to fit our company's needs mainly, as we have lots of
projects running simultaneously and pull requests were lost until the author
recruited some reviewers. After making it we found it was very useful and it
applied a little game layer in our development team. We wanted to share it
with other companies like us, so we refactored it as a service. We're looking
for other ways to distribute it and Apple TV/Chromecast and Smart TVs are good
ideas, we're currently figuring how to apply that.

The main handicap of this service is the R/W permissions of Github repos and
we know it. This is the reason why we try to explain all the process, to gain
user's confidence. We can't change this now, but we want to offer this product
anyway to the companies that don't care about this or simply trust us. And
yes, we will be there, well prepared, when the "Pull Request" github
permission appears. It will be awesome.

Finally, yeah, I also hate these sites that don't explain you what the app
does at first sight, and wow, it's good to know some people thinks this of my
site. We'll take a look on that and try to show it better.

~~~
dogma1138
Hi Arol :)

I couldn't figure out what your app exactly does besides show some pull
requests statistics. An explanation of all the features, and the process it
self as well as the workflow would be nice. Some info about who and how should
this be used in existing environments. e.g. what happens if i already have a
pull request workflow in my CI/ticketing system can this be integrated with
something like Jenkins?. Can you customize your workflow? are there any other
features for this besides looking pretty like IFTTT workflows if you say need
to delegate a task to some one, can you create/assign tasks related to a pull
request, can you have M of N or multi tiered approval system (e.g. team lead,
and architect) etc. I'm not trying to be overly negative and I apologies if it
comes out this way I just assume there is more to this app than just showing
pull requests in pretty colors and to me that's the only actual "fact" i could
get from the website.

