> People say Linear is fast but it's nothing compared to how well Pivotal worked.

My company switched off Pivotal Tracker because it would slow to a crawl and require several seconds (!!) to load the page, with individual actions causing a DOM cascade that frequently hung browsers. Maybe it worked at small scale but it definitely didn’t work at a large scale.

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latchkey 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's weird. Pivotal itself had hundreds of developers using it for what was thousands of projects. It was never slow like that for us, unless they were having some sort of outage or something.

I hate to say it, but my immediate guess is that your company was using it in some fashion that it wasn't intended for. That was the real problem with the tool. Unless you actually worked at Pivotal, you never really got to learn how to use it the way they intended. The documentation was good, but nothing beats going to the source.

What is your best guess for why it got so slow?

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raverbashing 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh so you mean mandatory pairing (which does away with the deep thinking required for some algos) and requiring "clean code" and other Uncle Bob BS doesn't contribute to actually scalable and efficient code?

Color me shocked

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Spartan-S63 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

As someone who spent a few years in the codebase for Tracker. There was some attempt at “Clean Code” but mostly basic DRY techniques. The product, itself, was plagued by being in a split-brain reality of Backbone and React (we were migrating as much as possible to React). We never addressed performance low-hanging fruit for large projects and it’s because it affected relatively few customers.

That said, pairing has its ups and downs. I think as other folks have said, you miss out on being able to go deep on problems that require ruminating. You also lack overarching reviews that help to keep architecture clean. The code might be clean, but the architecture might get really messy really fast.

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latchkey 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I used to think the active pairing was just a fad or crazy talk. Then I went and worked at Pivotal and learned it first hand. The way they did it works.

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raverbashing 4 days ago | parent [-]

I believe you.

Though for the times I paired, it does help for easy/medium problems, but for me it is absolutely a no-go for things you need to "sit and think about" (check docs, or keep more than two or three things in your head at the same time)

	▲	latchkey 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		You learn to talk aloud instead of just doing everything in your head. Two minds are always better than one. It becomes a great collaboration. This gets combined with how they "fire" people there. If your pair isn't keeping up and contributing enough, then people stop wanting to pair with them and they get rotated out to another team or entirely. That effectively means that the person sitting next to you, can actually help you. It does get really intense because if you're having a hard day or week say in your personal life, you still have to be on your game or you have to explain your situation as best as you can. But the thing is, everyone who walked into the door of Pivotal, knew the rules ahead of time. You were there, because you wanted to be there, not because it was just another job. I liken it a lot to joining the military, which is what it felt like. A bit cultish too. All-in-all, I had a great experience there, learned a ton, and it changed my thinking forever.