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Python Task Planner

Last week, Richard Jones made an intriguing post about project planning, Python style. Today, he follows it up with the code. It is a simple task planner for resource allocation, interruptions, HTML plan and Gantt chart generation. I played with it for few minutes this morning. Like Python, it fits my brain . I’m planning to check this out even more. I like Microsoft Project quite a lot - but for programmers, it can often get in the way.

What I really like about Richard’s idea:

1. Simple to use; yet it gives most of the information that matters.
2. All 3 files (plan, people and work log) are independent. Software takes care of making meaning out of them. This is really nice - integration where it is necessary.
3. In an environment where you don’t get to follow rigorous down-to-the-hour scheduling, you still need MS Project or similar software. This one takes care of planning. Usually, programmers worry more about planning than scheduling. For that purpose, this ought to be very useful.
4. Readable code, in readable language; great for extending.

I’m getting some really weird ideas like:

• Can’t tasks.csv be exported from a weblog with the following mapping?

  (id, group, task, effort, skill, depends) :: (permalink, category, blog_entry_title, encoded_in_description, author, trackback)

• people.csv can be simply an export of list of authors; or you can keep it separate. This file is not going to change often.
• Similarly, done.csv can be exported from a blog:

  (week, day, numdays, who, activity) :: (from_entry_date, from_entry_date, encoded_in_description, author, entry_title or trackback to original tasks blog entry)

This should nicely tie in to using blogs for PM. Essentially, automate the generation of semantic information from free-form data entry, with some conventions.

For immediate use, I’m going to use this with my pickle jar.

Anyway, I’m hoping Richard would write a scheduler too. He’s going to need one soon, if he has to get any sleep; considering the number of OSS projects he works on.