The delightful idea

The WIP meeting

The story begins with a team of developers at a weekly Work In Progress (WIP) meeting with the broader communications team. We do the usual rounds with each person giving a progress update on the previous week, and what they'll be working on this week.

Some of the tasks are not marked as complete during the week until they're checked off in the WIP meeting. At the time we were using Asana, and sometimes when you complete a task it would have a little creature animate diagonally across the screen. They had three or four different creatures randomly selected.

The anticipation that we might get an animation was a bonus bit of joy to start the week. When we did get one, we all cheered and had a great time for a few seconds.

The let down

At one point, something happened to the Asana animations... they had introduced a bug in one of the updates, where sometimes the screen would flicker and... nothing! No animation. You might see one of the creatures for about 50 milliseconds in the bottom left, then a couple of weird flickers of the screen.

To have the anticipation of an animation, and sometimes see one, to then have all of it taken away. That was very disappointing.

Solving the problem

That's when I thought the team should build our own to fix the problem. The team loved the idea, but didn't want to spend their personal time on it... but I couldn't let it go. It seemed like a pretty easy thing to build, so I just got stuck in on the weekend.

While Asana took months to fix their bug, I had my new animated celebration thingy up and running as a browser extension in a week. This was before the AI boom, so it was purely written the good old way, in vanilla JavaScript. I miss getting in the zone and writing code for hours.

Within the first month, Delightful had four animations (Party Parrot, Nyan Cat, Confetti and Grogu - AKA Baby Yoda), and worked in six project management software systems (Asana, GitHub, Jira, Todoist, Trello and Wrike).

The extension started to gain popularity internally

The celebrations on Monday mornings were stronger than ever. There might have been some tasks broken down into smaller tasks during the week, just to have more tasks to check off during the Monday WIP. It got a little out of control, and we realised the error of our ways:

A little delight goes a long way, too much delight ruins the fun.

We self-corrected... a bit.