12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff: LinearB

It’s that time of year again. Snow has begun falling from the skies in places that are lucky enough to have moisture in the air, we’re all already tired of hearing Michael Buble songs playing on a loop, and some of us are getting in the spirit by wearing ugly Christmas sweaters everywhere we go.  

To celebrate, Shortcut is highlighting twelve of our favorite integrations and partnerships. We hope you return every day to read these posts alongside your tinglers and fuzzles, your dafflers and wuzzles, and your delicious pot (or Beyond meat) roast.

Our seventh featured Integration is LinearB. SaaS that correlates signals from code, Git, projects and releases to automate daily improvement from developer to CTO.

Before we get into our integration with LinearB, let’s talk about LinearB’s name. We already talked a bit about names in an earlier post, plus we’ve spent an enormous amount of time thinking about names this year, so why not take one more turn at the naming wheel? Plus, we think LinearB’s name is cool.

What do you think they’re named after?

1. The Linear passage of time that we experience here in variant B 312 of the Multiverse?
2. The Linear way we’re forced to drive within lanes due to unfair traffic laws that don’t allow us to all speed down the freeway doing B shaped donuts at 120 mph?
3. The Linear B version of the ECMAScript engine, which powered versions 1 and 2 of the Presto browser engine, which in turn powered the Opera browser in the mid-2000s?

You may be shocked to learn it is none of these.

Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of Greek. We’d like to extend a special thank you to Wikipedia for providing us with this information, as well as for writing that previous sentence for us. As LinearB says on their own site:

“We get asked about our company name quite a bit. Our founder, Ori Keren, likes history and read about the LinearA and LinearB languages originating from the Minoans and Mycenaeans over 3,000 years ago.

After archeologists deciphered the thousands of tablets with LinearB writing, they discovered a rich, advanced society with significant creativity and elements of gender equality – things that speak to the founders of Linear B.”

Pretty cool. Another thing that’s cool is our integration with them. Here’s what you can do with it:

Their timeline view provides detailed visibility of every feature, bug and chore by showing a live feed of activity from branches, PRs and releases for Shortcut stories.

Workflow definition + alerts highlight blockers, delays, high-risk code, and branches that were merged without review for Shortcut stories.

Shadow work detector finds developer work in Git that is not currently attached to a Shortcut story.

Advanced cycle time dashboard provides more details to the Shortcut cycle time chart by adding bottleneck detection, visualizing the time across individual development phases – coding time, PR pick-up time, PR review time and release time.

Setup your LinearB + Shortcut integration

If you’re already signed up for Shortcut and LinearB, it just takes a few minutes to integrate your accounts.

Generate a Shortcut API token by navigating to Settings > Your Account > API Tokens.

Then head over to your LinearB account. Click the Settings gear icon, click the Project management tab then click Connect on the Shortcut icon.

Next, enter your Shortcut API token here.

Then close by customizing your LinearB + Shortcut integration settings.

That’s it.

That’s it?

That’s it; very easy to set up. With Shortcut and LinearB you’ll be getting more detail and making better (and easier) decisions in no time.

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