Just built a custom portal for stakeholders using Jira and a simple site.

Just spent a week building a custom dashboard for non-technical stakeholders to see project status. They didn't want to log into Jira. Again.

Instead of adopting some "modern" SaaS dashboard tool that'll change its API next quarter, I used what we already have: Jira's REST API and a simple Python backend with Jinja2. It's ugly, but it works. Permanently.

Here's the gist of the view function:

```python
def project_overview(request):
jira_url = "https://jira.example.com/rest/api/2/search"
query = {
'jql': 'project = PROJ AND status NOT IN ("Done", "Closed")',
'fields': 'key,summary,status,assignee'
}
# Auth and headers omitted for brevity
response = requests.get(jira_url, params=query, auth=(USER, TOKEN))
issues = response.json()['issues']
return render(request, 'overview.html', {'issues': issues})
```

The template is basic HTML table. It's hosted internally, updates every 15 minutes via a cron job that caches the results. No real-time nonsense.

Now the PMs are happy because they get a "portal." I'm happy because I didn't have to learn, license, or migrate to yet another visual tool that promises to "simplify" everything while adding three new layers of complexity.

Anyone else just glue together the boring tools you already have instead of buying the shiny thing?