Serpent Collab was my answer to the “just checking in” email. Project boards your clients actually open.
When you work with a client, both sides have tasks. You are building, they are sending assets. You are designing, they are approving. But your todo list only shows your half. Serpent Collab put both halves on one screen: a winding snake path through the project, with milestones for the phases, your tasks on the left and the client’s on the right. Every checked task filled the snake with colour, from both sides, until the two met in the middle. When a phase is done, confetti. When the project is done, confetti everywhere.
What made it different:
- Two-sided. Most tools show your tasks. This one showed both sides to both people, so nobody had to guess who was waiting on whom.
- No account for the client. They clicked the link and were in. No signup, no password. The link was the project.
- Five kinds of cards. Tasks, approvals, ping-pong handoffs, calls and meetings: the things that actually happen with a client, not just checkboxes.
- Live. When the client checked something off, you saw it at once, and every step went into an activity log.
It ran on Supabase and PartyKit, had payments for a while, then went free. Today it is frozen. The site is still up and the board still opens, but sign-in and saving no longer work. It stays online as a finished piece, not a product.
Two of my Bug Autopsies happened inside it: Safari’s seventeen-year-old foreignObject bug and the cron job that outlived its feature.