Colaby 🕶️ Space Devin

The Idea That Kept Coming Back

Colaby was already ten years old when I rebuilt it in a weekend. colaby.com went up in 2011 calling itself "the project management system that makes sense," with an email capture box and a footer crediting caffeine and Arzy. In April 2021 I opened a fresh create-next-app and named it colaby-fauna.

The board has four columns: completed, current, backlog, icebox. Auth0 handled login and FaunaDB held the data, so there was no database to run and no session code to write, just a Next.js app talking to two hosted services.

I worked on it for four days and then stopped. The domain is still around.

Two Databases, One App

Colaby ran on two databases, colaby_app and colaby_main: one for the application and one for everything shared across it. That way the same code could point at someone else's tables.

That's what made the Luma fork work. When I ported Colaby onto Big Brother's database, the split was already there.

I started it in 2010 because every ticket system I paid for annoyed me, and I was still using it six years later, through Crunchbutton and a couple of apartment moves. The public landing page only ever said it would let you know when it was ready. It ran my working life for most of a decade.

The Project Management System

"Colaby is a our take on project management." The typo was right there on the landing page in February 2011, and I'm not fixing it now. The rest read: "A set of tools and workflow built for, what we would like to think, everyone." Then an invitation to check out the development page, "and effectively a demo of Colaby."

The footer said "Powered by Colaby, Caffeine & is a product of Arzy," Arzy being what was left of ArzDev, the freelance shop I'd been running under one name or another since 2003. It was a self hosted project tracker I was using on my own work, with a landing page and an email box: "Drop us your email and we'll let you know when we're ready." It never launched.

February 2011 was Luma, Give.mobi and a lot of late nights. Colaby was me deciding the tool I used to keep track of all that should be a product too.