Category Archives: Kerika

Posts about Kerika, the company and its people

We just overhauled the entire back end of Kerika

Kerika, Technology

An effort that took 2 years finally completed yesterday when we updated the Kerika app.

This massive project involved rewriting everything on the back-end of Kerika in order to modernize the architecture and set up us for a more rapid development of end-user functionality, as well as making it easier to release new versions in the future using Docker container.

Our old backend was not well designed: everything ran as a single monolithic server. Over the years we moved slowly away from that, by building new features as microservices, and while that helped a little, it wasn’t enough.

We had reached a point where it was taking exponentially more time to build new features, and we were facing operational risk as well because the old backend was poorly understood and document.

A complete rewrite was necessary, and we bit the bullet on that a couple of years ago. There was significant cost and complexity but our great team powered through all the challenges, particularly when it came to transitioning our main database away from MySQL (hosted as RDS, by Amazon) to a NoSQL model using Google’s Firestore service.

Now that we are done we can start delivering more functionality, starting with support for non-English languages.

Stay tuned for our first non-English language, which will be Hindi, to be offered in a couple of weeks.

6 Project Management Techniques For Work-Life Balance

Kerika

Once again Kerika is featured in an article, this time on the 6 Project Management Techniques For Work-Life Balance at Namaste UI.

The techniques include:

  1. Treating Work-Life Balance as a Cycle
  2. Prioritization and Time Management
  3. Agile Project Management
  4. Delegation and Collaboration
  5. Setting Realistic Goals and Expectations
  6. Regular Evaluation and Reflection

To quote from the article:

Tools like Kerika can help you see and analyze how your projects are going, so you can find patterns, things that slow you down, and ways to get better.

Check it out.

Kerika has been getting rave reviews on Slashdot and Sourceforge

Kerika

It’s been great to see the reviews come in on Sourceforge and Slashdot, where Kerika is listed as a leader in the Task Management category!  Click on the badges below to check out the reviews:

Kerika Reviews


Kerika Reviews


330k Downloads For Kerika Task Management App: How They Did It

Kerika

Website Planet featured an interview with Arun Kumar, CEO of Kerika, where he talks about Kerika journey from concept to getting 330K downloads from the Google Workspace Marketplace.  Topics covered include:

  • Introducing Kerika: What is it and how does it work?“… the fact that our users range from global automobile companies down to young children highlights the biggest advantage of using Task Boards: it is super easy for people to pick up the concept and there’s no training needed.”
  • How did it all start, and what are your achievements to this day?“We were the first to create these incredibly flexible Whiteboards that can not only contain ideas, text, and diagrams, but also files and content from the Web.”

    “Now we have users in every continent and we get 5-star reviews everywhere…”
  • How does your mission differ from the other companies in your niche?“…designing a tool that ordinary folks can use, without training. We are building “task management for the rest of us.”
  • Who are your typical clients and what problems do they have when they come to you?“Describing our “typical clients” is impossible for me, because we have such a wide variety of users.”
  • And what makes them eventually choose you over your competitors?“What we have heard consistently, from users across the board, is that they love the user experience.”
  • Can you share one success story from your customers? What was their pain point, and what results did they get thanks to Kerika? 

    https://youtu.be/U7hQEvhbIPw

  • What do you see in the future of your industry, and how do you plan to cope?“Our focus isn’t going to change. We believe very passionately that everyone else in this space is still neglecting what we call “regular folks”. We love regular folks, and we will continue to make sure we have the best user experience for them!”

The interview was conducted with Bethenny Carl from Website Planet.

How to import boards from Trello

Kerika, Technology, Usability,

We have added an exciting new feature: if you were previously using Trello, you can import that data, completely, into Kerika!

We have been testing this as a convenience feature and based upon positive feedback we have expanded this for everyone.

New users will be offered this as an option when they set up their Kerika accounts:

Screenshot showing how new Kerika users can import boards from Trello
How new Kerika users can import boards from Trello

All users will have this option whenever they want to create a new Kerika board:

Screenshot showing how all users can import from Trello when creating a new Kerika board
All users can import from Trello when creating a new Kerika board

We built this feature because we have heard from many people switched over from Trello and really liked Kerika’s user experience, features, and support. In the past they had to manually recreate their work inside Trello; now that’s all automated!

Everything is handled nicely: your Trello cards, lists, people, task details, etc. come over. Once you are done, a single click can then send out invitations to all your old Trello colleagues to join you in Kerika.

Enjoy.

 

A change to our Privacy Policy

Kerika,

We have updated our Privacy Policy because we have decided to use Microsoft Clarity, at least on an experimental basis, to understand better how visitors navigate our website.

Microsoft Clarity uses cookies (see here for more details), and you can reject or block them if you want; it won’t affect your use of the website or the app.

We have a lot of different website pages, but we still need a better understanding of how people actually view them, and which parts seem to be most important to our users.

Google Analytics provides some of that information, but not enough, and it looks like Microsoft Clarity will help us optimize our website content.

Let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

How Kerika became zippy

Kerika, Technology

With the new version you will notice that Kerika has become much faster on the desktop than previously: now any board, regardless of size, should load in under 3 seconds if you have a fast Internet connection.

With the old version this wasn’t true: the time to load a board was proportional to the number of cards (tasks) that were on the board, and while most users didn’t notice any lag, people who were using Kerika at a large scale, e.g. with boards of a thousand cards, would have to wait a while for the largest board to full open.

With our old code, every board was loaded sequentially column by column, starting with the leftmost column, and within each column every card was loaded before another column’s loading started.  This approach didn’t scale well, and the flaw of this approach became all to obvious when we built our mobile apps, which used a “lazy loading” approach.

To fix this, we rewrote the desktop app from scratch, an effort that took nearly nine months for our small team to complete, from design, implementation, testing and endless refinement.

With lazy loading the system prioritizes which cards to load, rather than trying to load all of them one by one.  If your board has 15 columns, for example, not all of these can be viewed at the same time: most displays will show just 5-6 columns at a time.  Kerika keeps track of which part of the board you were last viewing, and then intelligently loads the board from that point of view.

All the other columns are loaded only as the system senses you are going to need them: as you scroll to the left or right, for example, the system automatically (and quickly) fetches more columns into view. If the system does this fast enough, the user never realizes that her entire board wasn’t loaded at the very beginning, because no matter where she is looking, everything she needs is always in view.

We took a similar approach to loading columns with a lot of cards (tasks). Instead of loading all the cards that exist within a column — and these can number hundreds, for large boards — the system considers how many can be displayed at a time given the user’s particular device: laptop, desktop, tablet, or phone.

Having calculated how much of a column can be actually viewed by a user, the system loads just those many — and a few more in anticipation of the user scrolling her view of a column. As the user continues scrolling down a column, the system races to fetch more cards from the server so there’s never a gap in the user’s view.

But lazy loading alone wasn’t enough, we also had to deal with the speed at which a browser can display a bunch of cards. This speed varies by browser type, as well as device.  A low-powered computer, perhaps running an older browser, can’t render cards as fast as we need for the user to have a true real-time experience.