Developer Productivity Hiccups

Every developer wants to be productive, write more code, and spend more time developing their applications. However, while working in teams, this is often slowed down a lot, because of endless interruptions such as Slack or GitHub notifications, team meetings, and other teams wanting some information which all leads to a lot of context switching.

This context switching can cause you to lose focus on your code, and at the end of the day, you might be asking yourself questions like "Where'd all my time go? Why was I not able to finish this easy feature today?"

All these invisible tasks cause a ton of time wastage and developer productivity plummets. All these small tasks also take developers out of the flow and can cause them to forget what they were doing.

In addition to all the noise and distractions, workloads and teams are increasing, and many developers are now working remotely which introduces a need for more meetings, new tools are being introduced every day, priorities are becoming unclear, and timelines are drifting.

Zigi to the Rescue

Zigi is a personal assistant for developers that works directly from Slack, offering actual help in managing your repetitive and non-coding tasks and helping you connect with your teammates’ workflow. Zigi is revolutionizing the way that R&D departments operate, moving away from the “black box” model toward radical transparency that actually helps developers focus on their work!

It connects to all the tools you use daily, such as GitHub, Jira, with more to come, and examines all your activity. All of this data is analyzed and cross-referenced with the systems in real-time to learn your work habits, figure out what are you working on and determine your priorities, even if you forget to update your task list.

Let's say you are working on writing a feature to integrate slack notifications into your application. Someone opens a ticket about a misaligned div element. You wouldn't need to know about that while you are working on the integration. Zigi will scan through all the noise, and pick the relevant information, and you need.

Zigi offers full support for the entire PR process, helping to speed up collaborative tasks, like finding reviewers, pinging teammates, etc., while taking everything into account - multiple locations, different time zones, asynchronous work weeks - enabling easy, fast collaboration. Just a couple of clicks in Slack is all it takes to request a PR review, select reviewers, send reminders, and more.

For team leaders, Zigi is like a command center within Slack. The goal is to help them focus more on people and less on the operational side. So Zigi brings a real-time view of what everyone is doing, how busy are they, who's overloaded, and what's stuck and needs their attention - so team leaders can offer help, remove obstacles and drive development forward.

In addition, Zigi takes care of non-coding tasks, like correlating tickets with PRs, updating tickets, and many other workflow processes that our users usually need to remember and keep in their heads. It also uses this view to identify risks and bottlenecks and lay them out for the developers so they can do something about them.

Another thing Zigi does is help developers show their contribution to the team. Since we design and build software as a team, it’s important to show both developers and managers how you win as a team.

What Makes it Unique

In contrast to the currently existing tools, which focus intensely on constantly trying to measure better and predict better, it’s time to change the perception to one that doesn’t put the focus on managers measuring their developers’ work. Especially now that the world of work as we knew it is gone and folks take on a remote/hybrid work culture.

The goal is to help push dev forward in a way that’s suited to each team member, offering a hands-on approach to minimize admin work, clear obstacles, and drive dev forward, all from Slack.

Conclusion

Zigi is helping developers avoid unnecessary notifications and focus more on coding their applications. Using Zigi, developers don't have to worry about getting notifications irrelevant to what they are currently working on.

This as a whole will reduce unnecessary noise, and allow developers to focus on writing code, and being more productive at the end of the day.

Get Involved

Zigi is currently in free and open beta. You sign up, receive a link, and start using it.

• Try out Zigi
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