Full-stack App · Personal project · 2026
A sprint planning web application I built, deployed, and run entirely on my own — because building things yourself is the best way to understand them.
I've been running sprint ceremonies for years as part of my production work. The tools available are either too large and complex for small teams, or too simple to be genuinely useful. JiffySprint started as a scratch-your-own-itch project — a sprint planning tool built around the way I actually run sprints, rather than around the way a product manager thinks sprints should theoretically be run.
It also gave me a reason to build a full production stack from the ground up — authentication, database schema, REST API, frontend state management, deployment pipeline — all of it. There's no better way to understand a technology than to ship something real with it.
JiffySprint handles the full sprint lifecycle for small to mid-sized teams. You set up projects and teams, build out a backlog with epics and tasks, run a sprint planning session where tasks get assigned against each team member's available capacity (accounting for leave), track daily standups with hours remaining per task, watch the burndown chart update in real time, and close the sprint with retro notes and automatic rollover of incomplete work.
The backlog has drag-to-reorder epics, projected finish date calculations based on team velocity, and remaining hours tracking. Role-based access means admins manage the structure and members manage their own tasks.
The frontend and backend are deployed separately. The backend runs on Railway with a persistent SQLite volume. DNS and proxy go through Cloudflare. Pushes to the main branch on GitHub trigger automatic deploys — I never manually upload anything.
Building and running a live product solo forces a particular kind of discipline. Every decision is yours. Every bug is yours. When something breaks at 11pm you can't wait for someone else to fix it. That accountability sharpens your thinking about architecture, about what you actually need versus what you think you might need, and about the relationship between complexity and maintenance cost.
I've used JiffySprint to run real sprints. The feedback loop of using your own tool in anger, then immediately being in a position to fix the things that annoy you, is one of the fastest ways to learn product thinking I've found.