Your Work, Your Way
Meera just passed the one-year mark as our daily driver. We moved our gem dependencies to our internal Nexus server this week. One of those small infrastructure changes that makes you stop and think about how far a project has come.
A year ago this was a board with inline editing and drag-and-drop. Now it runs our product planning, our sprint tracking, our infrastructure tasks. When a client asks “what’s the status on STORY-42?” we answer immediately, because the issue has an ID, and the status lives in the same place where the work happens. On our terms, on our infrastructure, with our identity system.
If you’re curious how we got here, I wrote about why we started building Meera back when Atlassian pulled the rug on our Jira licenses. The short version: Jira Cloud couldn’t migrate our workflows, Monday.com couldn’t integrate with our stack, and we needed something that works with our LDAP and our CI server.
The things that made it worth the investment:
Cross-board views. “My Work” aggregates every item assigned to you across all boards and workspaces, sorted by due date. “Calendar” plots them on a month view. These are what turned Meera from “a board tool” into “where I start my day.”
LDAP sync. Someone joins the company, they show up in Meera. Someone leaves, they’re removed. No manual account management. This alone justified building our own. No SaaS tool integrates with Active Directory the way we needed.
The JSONB schema. Item values stored as a hash keyed by column ID. Every team configures their boards differently. Sales tracks Deals with Stage and Value columns, engineering tracks Stories with Status and Sprint. Same tool, completely different shapes, zero database migrations.
Board-local sequential IDs. STORY-1, STORY-2, BUG-47. You reference them in commits, in Slack, in client emails. Simple, but it’s one of those things you don’t realize you need until you try to coordinate without it.
That Jira Cloud migration that failed twice turned out to be the best thing that happened to us.