Announcing QWAN Tracker

QWAN Tracker is task tracker for small, fast moving teams. For people who do the work, by people who do the work. It lets you quickly jot down things you think need doing as you are working, so you can stay focused on the task at hand. Keyboard navigation, and live sync so your partners stay in the loop.

I don’t build web applications for myself usually. But qwan tracker is both fun and useful - for me, and then for me and Stephan Eggermont. I like tools to be responsive, and get out of the way. This doesn’t have to be for everyone. If it works for me, there might be more people who like it. Who knows.

This is an early release, see below for details. Stephan and I have been using this for two weeks, to steer our work, and we are enjoying it. We hope you might too.

X: If you aren’t embarrased to by your first release, you left it too late. Me: Only do this when you are able to iterate.

Target audience

• individuals who have moved their todos back to a text file, because all the online trackers got enshittified or disappeared
• small teams who move fast and faster, and care about getting the details right, but don’t want to describe the details in detail ;-).
• 12 people who want to give us feedback and influence direction.

This is an early release.

Non Goals

• Estimation. Tasks move one at a time, if they are too big, break them down or use another medium for the conversation.
• Enterprise management reporting (this is necessary sometimes, but not in the context of small teams of indie developers for instance, there are other tools for that).

Options

Things that we might build, but don’t commit to

• API so that you can hook up your favorite language model to brainstorm with, or your coding agent to pick up tasks.
• Renaming boards
• Renaming, adding and removing columns
• Change categories - code smells and refactorings don’t work for everything ;-)
• Board dashboard, so you can collect all your boards (this will probably be a paid option, we are thinking of ways to sell boards in an affordable way and with as little commitment as possible)
• Ways to link to and from other mediums (e.g. opportunity solution trees, event storms, user story maps ).
• Digital Sovereignty Edition. Self hosting for data privacy, formerly known as Enterprise Edition. Probably comes with some kind of DevOps capability assesment beforehand. Only latest version supported.

You can’t always build what you want,

So sometimes, you build what you need. I didn’t plan to build yet another task tracker. But once it was there, before I knew it, I had four boards live. So maybe you find this something useful. Main reason for building this is that we want a multi player version of Refactoring Cards (contact us if you want early access for the single player / co-located pair version).

QWAN tracker helps me and Stephan Eggermont stay on track - thanks for helping me get this out of the door. We have many ideas, and every time we finish something, we have even more. Initially, as you will see in this version, you will be greeted by draft code smells and refactoring cards. Press ‘d’ to delete cards. Press ‘?’ to see the help and what keyboard commands you can use.