// the find
stride-nyc/remote_retro
Free, world-class retrospectives
RemoteRetro is a Phoenix/React/Redux app for running Agile retrospectives with distributed teams. It handles the full retro lifecycle — idea submission, grouping, voting, action items — with real-time sync via Phoenix Channels. Built and open-sourced by Stride Consulting, it's been running in production long enough to have meaningful migration history.
The Phoenix Channels implementation is the right call here: OTP supervision gives you process isolation per retro room for free, and the presence tracking is handled by the framework rather than rolled by hand. The test suite is unusually thorough for a side-project-scale app — Elixir unit tests, React component tests, Redux reducer tests, and Wallaby-based end-to-end feature tests all coexist with a clear structure. The migration history is honest archaeology: you can trace every schema decision back to a specific feature addition, which is more than most apps of this age offer. The Redux state shape maps cleanly to the retro stages, making the client-side flow easy to follow.
It requires Google OAuth with the deprecated Google+ API enabled — that API was shut down in 2019, so this either silently breaks or someone patched it without updating the README. The setup process is genuinely painful: asdf for Erlang/Elixir/Node, manual Postgres setup, three env vars for OAuth, and a Semantic UI build step that requires its own script. No Docker Compose means onboarding a new contributor takes an hour before they see a login page. Last meaningful activity appears to have stopped around 2021 based on the migration timestamps, so there's no LiveView rewrite or Elixir 1.16+ compatibility work — you're adopting a frozen snapshot of 2021-era Phoenix patterns.