If you’re looking for an external, non-open source home for your code or a light-weight, web-based project management tool, I highly recommend using Unfuddle.

Actually, up until recently I wasn’t all that crazy about this site. We had been using it at work for the last year as a project management tool for external clients who wanted to integrate with our web services and it seemed rather limited and clunky when compared to JIRA, the most excellent issue tracking tool we use internally (there were various internal constraints that prevented us from using JIRA externally).

It wasn’t really until I started searching for an external location for my DosPecesCreation repository, the project I’ve been working on in my spare time recently, that I gained a new appreciation for Unfuddle.

Most of the free options for externally hosted repositories out there seem to be limited to open source projects, but Unfuddle offers a private plan for free that provides an unlimited number of Subversion or Git repositories along with 1 associated project for issue tracking and access for 2 people.

By moving my code from a local repository to unfuddle, I was not only able to work from multiple computers without the headaches involved in using a tool like Live Sync (formerly FolderShare) in conjunction with SVN, but I was also able to offload much of the CSS and HTML work to my wife. Before she had been sending me email approximations of the changes she wanted, but with a quick 5 minute tutorial on TortoiseSVN along with some automated scripts and shortcuts to set up her Rails environment, she was able to make the changes directly herself.

Of course from my lovely stakeholder’s perspective, that that mostly just meant that I now had more time to work on the now rather large list of programming-related feature requests that she had thought up for version 2.0 of the site.

Luckily, Unfuddle has helped with this too. It dramatically increased my ability to organize and group tasks while adding only a minimal amount of overhead. The last thing I want when I am working on a project in my free time is anything remotely heavy weight in terms of process.

While this minimalist approach might not work as well in heavily regulated corporate environments, it fits beautifully for small, agile teams and especially for small 1-2 developer projects.

Here’s a screenshot of the current tickets broken down by milestones (which we decided to base upon 2 week release cycles). As you’ll notice, I’ll be spending some nights in the near future working on caching and implementing all of YSlow’s suggestions in order to speed up the site a bit.

I had a sneaking suspicion that my nights would be busy for quite some time, but now thanks to Unfuddle I have a much clearer picture of the extent of my servitude.

Looks like I’ll have free time again sometime in the fall of 2014…Thanks unfuddle!

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