Trello is a web-based list-making program designed in the Kanban method. Trello Enterprise is an Atlassian subsidiary. It was developed in 2011 by Fog Creek Software (now Glitch), spun off in 2014 to serve as the foundation of a different business in New York City, then sold to Atlassian in January 2017.
History
The word “trellis,” which had been used as a code name for the project in its early stages, inspired the name Trello. Joel Spolsky, the creator of Fog Creek, announced the launching of Trello at a TechCrunch event. The application was designated one of “The 7 Coolest Startups You Haven’t Heard of Yet” by Wired magazine in September 2011. According to Lifehacker, “it makes project collaboration easy and somewhat pleasurable.”
Index Ventures and Spark Capital provided $10,3 million in funding for it in 2014. The founders of Trello, Michael Pryor, and Joel Spolsky, owned the remaining shares after selling 22% of them to investors before being acquired. Trello claimed to have 14 million total signups and more than 1.1 million daily active users in May 2016.
Atlassian declared its intention to purchase Trello for $425 million on January 9, 2017. $360 million in cash and $65 million in shares and options were used to complete the deal. In December 2018, Butler, a business that created a “Power-Up” for automating chores within a Trello board, was acquired by Trello Enterprise. In March 2019 Trello claimed 35 million users, and in October 2019 it predicted 50 million users.
Users can create custom task boards with a variety of columns and move things around within them. Columns typically feature task statuses like To Do, In Progress, and Done. In addition to case management in law offices, the program can be used for real estate administration, software project management, lesson planning, school bulletin boards, accountancy, web design, and gaming.
Architecture
Using Backbone.js, HTML5 .pushState(), and the Mustache templating language, the client was a thin web layer that downloaded the core program, which was written in CoffeeScript and compiled to minified JavaScript. A customized version of Socket.io, Node.js, and MongoDB was used to build the server.
Reviews
Trello received a 3.5 out of 5 rating from PC Magazine on January 26, 2017. The publication described it as “fluid” and said that “you can get quite creative,” but added that “it may take some experimenting to figure out how to effectively use it for your team and the workload you handle.
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