The Name
“Merrily” comes from the idea that work should have rhythm and momentum — like a song that carries you forward. The Shape Up methodology gives teams that rhythm: six-week cycles of focused work, followed by two-week cooldowns. No infinite backlogs. No death marches. Just sustainable, directed effort.
Why Shape Up?
Most project management tools are built around Scrum or Kanban — methodologies that work for some teams but create busywork for others. Shape Up, developed at Basecamp, offers a different model: fixed time, variable scope. You bet on shaped work, give teams autonomy to figure out the details, and ship at the end of the cycle.
Merrily implements this methodology as a first-class citizen, not as a plugin or template layered on top of a generic task board.
The Architecture
The backend is Axum (Rust) with PostgreSQL — chosen for reliability and performance. The frontend is Nuxt 3 with Vue 3, providing a reactive interface that feels immediate. The Rust backend means the server is fast and resource-efficient, which matters when you’re self-hosting or running on modest infrastructure.
Privacy in Practice
Your team’s workflow data — what you’re working on, how you prioritize, where you’re stuck — is sensitive business intelligence. Merrily treats it that way. No analytics pipelines. No “insights” features that require sending your data to third-party AI services. Your operational data stays in your database.