Tracking your project with GitHub Issues

Day 328 / 366

Over the years I have used lots of different tools for Project Management, from something as basic as sharing a To-Do list over text, to something as complex as JIRA. For the past 4 years, I have primarily managed all of my projects on Notion. The good thing about Notion is that it is the Jack of all trades. You can use it for Ticketing, Meeting Notes, Documentations, or even creating basic static websites. As good as Notion has been, I think it is time for a change now.

In Github, there is a feature called “Issues”. My perception of Github issues was that it’s a way for people to log bugs or ask questions in Open Source Repositories. Recently, I had a chat with the head of a software agency and they showed me how they use GitHub Issues as their primary Project Management tool, and it's amazing.

When you are working on a software project, you need to find a way to link your ticketing system to your code repository. While Notion, Jira etc. have integrations with GitHub, they have their flaws. On the other hand, with Github Issues, the integration with code repo comes to rebuild, as both your ticketing system and your code are part of the same system.

And if you use Github Actions for your CI / CD, then it can be integrated with your tickets as well. This is a good way to keep track of your releases and deployments.

It is a pain to link tickets with each other in Notion. But it is trivial to do in Github Issues. If you add any item as a checklist in your issue, you get the option to turn it into a separate issue that will become a child of this issue.

Right now with a team of around 10 people, Notion costs me 10k a month. Github on the other hand is free. It is a no-brainer for me to ditch Notion and move to Github to manage my projects. The only thing remaining then would be documentation, meeting notes etc. But I think I would be able to find an alterative for that as well.