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Introducing TenderSmash

Paul Stovell

Paul Stovell

— 1 min read
This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.

We use Tender for most of the Octopus Deploy support. I really like Tender because:

  • It allows for public (default) and private threads - we get very few duplicates because most people search for existing threads first
  • It allows customers to report and reply to issues via email

However, the admin UI for Tender, at least from my point of view, leaves a lot to be desired. Most of our customers are overseas, so new topics are usually created overnight. Each morning, we have between 15 and 20 discussions to reply to on Tender. The default Tender admin experience requires a lot of navigation to open each thread, scroll to the bottom and reply to it.

So, I built TenderSmash:

TenderSmash

TenderSmash is an alternative UI on top of Tender, that uses the Tender API's to list pending discussions and reply to them. I did a few things to try and optimize the experience:

  • It loads all the threads and comments up front - so you can just read, reply, read, reply, without waiting between threads.
  • It shows comments in reverse order - most of the time you only need to read the most recent comment before replying
  • It uses some quick response templates to generally reduce the amount of typing required

You can play with TenderSmash here:

tendersmash.com

TenderSmash is open source - you can find the code on GitHub.

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