As I started to develop much more complex applications for work, more and more bugs started to come up. It got to the point where I couldn't reliably keep a written or simple list of what I had to do and what was not working. And I definitely couldn't keep it in my head. Luckily at work we had a FogBugz account. FogBugz for those of you who don't know is a pretty advanced bug tracking web application made by Fog Creek (Joel Spolsky's company).

At first it took a while to get used to the work flow of FogBugz, but once we all started using it at SNM I really got into it and it helped me out greatly. However as I started to use it more and more I started to see problems in the interface and general application. It just took to much time and clicks to make bugs and close bugs. Now I think most of these problems are not really Fog Creek's problem, they made an excellent enterprise level bug tracking system. However using it in the small scale (two people) I think makes a lot of the features of FogBugz redundant and adds a lot of extra complexity.

So after spending some time experimenting with the FogBugz API I started to formulate an idea to make my own interface that would stream line the process. I wanted to see a simple list of bugs, ranked and color coded by priority with the latest message about the bug and a button to assign it to someone else and to close it. So after spending some time getting used to the API and building the interface I created a simple Django application that let me interface with the API and store simple user information in the servers memory. Here is a screen shot of the end result:

I was pretty happy with the first version. It let me quickly see what I had to do and check off things when I was done. This got me thinking, is there a market for a really simple 'to do list' or bug tracking web application for people like me? I think so. There are definitely quite a few other applications out there that do what I want but I have yet to find one 100% targeted at people who want something simple and to the point.

We'll see what comes of this idea. I've wanted to try to start developing my own apps for a while, and after thinking more about what I could do with a bug tracking application I really think I might be on to something. But then again maybe not. I'm never going to learn if I don't fail a few times anyways.

If you do use FogBugz and you want to check it out please do and let me know what you think, http://buggie.bmdev.org I don't use any database at all to store any of your data it all lives temporarily in the server's memory. Also if you want to check out the code you can see it on GitHub