Reaching for Meera Instead of a Spreadsheet

I caught myself using Meera for actual work today. That wasn’t the plan, but I had a list of things to sort through for a project, and I opened Meera instead of a Google Sheet. Didn’t think about it. Just did it.

To be clear: the data is still volatile. There’s no authentication, no multi-user support, the database gets wiped every time I reset my dev environment. I absolutely cannot use this for anything important or share it with anyone yet. But the fact that I reached for it over a spreadsheet, that the board experience is already more pleasant than a Google Sheet with colored cells, that tells me we are on the right track. For any production work, it’s still Jira and Google spreadsheets for now.

This week was all about making the board feel like something you can actually manage, not just look at. Sortable columns: drag the header to reorder. Resizable columns: drag the edge to change width. Column menus with the ability to remove columns you don’t need. Group management: add groups, reorder them, change their colors, delete them with a confirmation dialog.

The status update menu finally works properly too. Click a status cell, get a popover with the available labels, click one, the cell updates via Turbo Stream. No page reload, no flicker. The turbo-menu Stimulus controller handles lazy-loading the menu content from the server so we’re not rendering every possible menu on page load.

Date pickers landed. Due dates show a Flatpickr calendar on click. Inline editing for text and numbers was already in, so the full set of value types (text, numbers, dates, status, tags) all have proper edit interactions now.

Six weeks from the first commit. Still a long way from replacing our daily issue tracker, but the core board experience is there and it’s fun to use. Now I need to make it real: authentication, persistent data, deployment. The stuff that turns a fun prototype into a tool other people can rely on.