Elements Bookworm

Elements Bookworm - Logo

Inspiration

Nowadays everything is about new technologies, social media, binge TV, 24/7 news, etc. It can get a bit overwhelming, right? Younger generations barely know what a book looks like or smells like.. At Elements, we value that employees want to turn off from the frenzy of the world and what’s better than reading a book to do that?

Now, we all work in tech and so we thought it would be a great idea to be able to manage books inside our everyday working tool: Jira!

What it does

Elements Bookworm is an app that helps companies manage books in-house, or look up books from inside Jira.

When you install the app, 4 custom fields are created for you: Book: this custom fields queries the Google Books API for any book matches the user types in Book author: a read-only custom field that displays the author of the book selected Book description: a read-only custom field that displays the description of the book selected Book ISBN: a read-only custom field that displays the ISBN number of the book selected

You can add these custom fields to any screens of any projects like you would do it with any regular custom fields.

How we built it

Elements Bookworm uses:

Jira custom field
Forge trigger
Forge function
Custom UI
UI Kit
Search aliases

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some Forge limitations such as:

cannot add dependent custom fields on the create issue screens
limited control over the cover picture rendering in the custom field (UI Kit)

This app was developed by 2 developers over 4 days, and CI/CD turned out to be pretty tedious in Forge as the code repo is tied to an individual account. Only one developer was able to run deployments, this slowed us down throughout the development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We pulled off a working app in just 4 days, we are really proud of that!

We also had a lot of fun prepping the video, putting thoughts into the scenario and adding a funny twist to it! The scenes were shot in our office in Toulouse, and we all had a good laugh seeing our Head of Product aka “Harry Potter” bringing his A-game!

What we learned

We learned about how to manage custom fields in Forge, from select in Custom UI to read only in UI Kit and everything around (search alias, trigger…).

What's next for Elements Bookworm

First off, we’re definitely going to use Elements Bookworm in-house to manage our books! Everybody is really excited about that! Then, we can consider fleshing out the product by providing a wider range of read-only custom fields such as Edition, Publisher, Category, etc. We can also consider building custom field types, where users would be able to configure their fields the way they want, etc.

Music by Geoffrey Harvey from Pixabay