Hi, this is Alex, founder of CatLight - an action center for developers.
The CatLight app will monitor your CI/CD pipelines, code review, and issue-tracking systems. It will then show you a desktop notification for action items that the app has found. For example, it will notify you about a broken build pipeline, incoming code review request, or unreviewed issue. You can configure what you want to monitor, and what kind of events should create a notification. The app has a tray icon that will change color depending on your top action item severity. This will keep reminding you that something needs your attention, even if you missed the notification.
CatLight also has a dashboard that combines all your action items into a prioritized list. You can customize the priority rules so that you can handle that list from top to bottom. For example, you can say that doing a code review is more important than working on a sprint task and that fixing the release pipeline has a top priority. If you are already working on a
task, CatLight will only notify you if something with higher priority appears. That should help developers to stay focused and in the flow.
Compared to email and chat notifications, CatLight focuses on the current state, and not the history of changes. For example, your inbox can show 20 notifications about a broken CI/CD build pipeline, but they can be outdated, as someone fixed it recently. CatLight will automatically remove a "broken build" alert when the build is fixed.
I've seen notification fatigue and blindness across several of my development teams before. It happens when engineers get too many email notifications, most of them are irrelevant and not actionable, so they just start ignoring them altogether, and important day-to-day work gets delayed. CatLight should help with that.
We recently re-designed the app mechanics in v3. Let me know what you think!
New UI is a step forward, but many people don't look at it that often. They use CatLight or similar tools that show them build status right on the desktop.
The CatLight app will monitor your CI/CD pipelines, code review, and issue-tracking systems. It will then show you a desktop notification for action items that the app has found. For example, it will notify you about a broken build pipeline, incoming code review request, or unreviewed issue. You can configure what you want to monitor, and what kind of events should create a notification. The app has a tray icon that will change color depending on your top action item severity. This will keep reminding you that something needs your attention, even if you missed the notification.
CatLight also has a dashboard that combines all your action items into a prioritized list. You can customize the priority rules so that you can handle that list from top to bottom. For example, you can say that doing a code review is more important than working on a sprint task and that fixing the release pipeline has a top priority. If you are already working on a task, CatLight will only notify you if something with higher priority appears. That should help developers to stay focused and in the flow.
Compared to email and chat notifications, CatLight focuses on the current state, and not the history of changes. For example, your inbox can show 20 notifications about a broken CI/CD build pipeline, but they can be outdated, as someone fixed it recently. CatLight will automatically remove a "broken build" alert when the build is fixed.
I've seen notification fatigue and blindness across several of my development teams before. It happens when engineers get too many email notifications, most of them are irrelevant and not actionable, so they just start ignoring them altogether, and important day-to-day work gets delayed. CatLight should help with that.
We recently re-designed the app mechanics in v3. Let me know what you think!