Two kids and too many Github notifications

When you have young kids, work fits in between changing diapers, kissing boo-boos, and looking at animals in the back yard. Small efficiency wins start to feel more meaningful, as does being more ruthless about focus at work.

Github’s notifications used to work okay for me, but there can be more noise than signal. Here’s a typical view for me. It’s great that Vercel shipped all those canary versions, but this doesn’t help me do my work.

Wading through this is doable, but it’s like achieving inbox zero. Constant work.

My friend André showed me Graphite, which has a great PR inbox and review UIs. But its inbox never quite worked for me. Still too easy to accumulate stuff I don’t care about.

So like any self-respecting programmer, I thought how hard could it be to make my own app?

Enter Prism

It’s a prototype, not a complete app. Just a pull request inbox for both Github and Gitlab. PRs are grouped into a buckets to help understand where things are at and what you need to look at - needs your review, your PRs, your drafts, and recently merged.

And crucially, you can dismiss items you don’t care about. Click dismiss, and an item is gone from your view (at least until it has new activity).

Prism is free to use right now, so if you’re drowning in Github notifications, feel free to try it out at https://prismstudio.dev and let me know your feedback.