Trello is awesome for everything

The other week, I was introduced to Trello for the first time when Nick Craver shared a link to his public Trello board, and I fell in love.

Basically, Nick uses Trello to gauge what people would like to hear about on the Stack Overflow blog. You can see his board here. Later on when trying to figure out how to best organize the Microsoft Connect items about SQLPS, it occurred to me that Trello would be the perfect solution. And it is.

The SQLPS Trello board worked out so well, that when the topic of getting overdue some improvements into SSMS was brought up, Microsoft suggested that setting up another board for SQL Server Management Studio might work well too.

If you use either of these products, I strongly suggest you join us and give Microsoft your feedback. They actively participate on both boards which is just amazing.

To add to the fun, I created a PowerShell module to help easily tally the votes for any Trello board, and I put it in the PowerShell Gallery. To install and run, just run

1Install-Module TrelloVoteCount

This gives you 3 functions - Get-SqlPsVote - Get-TrelloVoteCount - Get-SsmsVote

Get-SqlPsVote shows the tally from the SQLPS Trello board in a GridView. Get-SsmsVote shows the votes from the SSMS board and Get-TrelloVoteCount is a generic function that works with any public board. Here's the one from Nick's board:

1Get-TrelloVoteCount -Id 0zgQjktX

PS C:\> Get-TrelloVoteCount -Id 0zgQjktX

Name                                                                   Votes
----                                                                   -----
How does Stack Overflow's architecture work?                           150
How do we do performance tuning?                                       125
What's in our dev toolchain?                                           110
How do we deploy?                                                      95
A day in the life of a Stack Overflow developer                        80

Or, if you're into it, check out an overview video:

In addition to community stuff, I'm also using Trello to help me sort out the design of my own module, dbatools.

So if you're into community involvement or PowerShell module design, give Trello a shot. It's my favorite new thing.