At my first developer job, we used a tool called Trello to track our sprint work – the stuff we had to get done every two weeks. Our process was that we would create stories and tasks on Trello, and then hand write the tasks onto PostIt notes to put on a physical whiteboard, because there is something deeply satisfying about moving a physical thing when completing a story.

The problem was, this took up time. Having a bunch of developers sitting around hand-writing tasks (with crappy hand-writing, to boot) was obnoxious. Everyone hated it, and everyone would talk about how “easy” and “dead stupid” it would be to just write some kind of app that would leverage the Trello API and generate a printer-friendly display of the tasks so we could just put those on the board. They talked about it, but…

No one did anything. Every sprint planning we’d have 3-5 developers spending an hour or two dutifully scrawling on PostIts while simultaneously bitching about how annoying it was.

Back then, my JavaScript was absolute crap (and to be honest, it still is) so I decided I wanted to get better at it, and was trying to think of a project I could use to do that. After noodling about, I realized that this “obvious” and “easy” project everyone was talking about would be a perfect fit. So I spent some time on a weekend screwing around, and created a very bare bones app that would give a sprint team their tasks, nicely laid out, with all the info that was relevant, ready to be printed out and used on the board.

I spent maybe 10 hours on it, total, and got familiar with some parts of JavaScript I hadn’t used before, so even without any other benefits, it was a win. But at work – it turned something that took up 3-10 total developer hours, per team, per every 2 weeks – into something that took about 10 minutes total. We had 4 sprint teams, and everyone started to use this, which means that my 10 hour weekend project wound up having some pretty disproportionate knock-on effects.

The thing I learned from this is that just having an idea isn’t any big deal. We ALL had the same idea. But acting on an idea – bringing it to fruition – that is special, and all-too-rare.