Wavelength, published by Asana | Hacker News Reader

Wavelength, published by Asana

wavelength.asana.com

32 pointsandygcook30 comments

Asana does a very bad job of telling you what their product does, and I hate being prompted to sign up for something when I don't even know what the product does.

Trello does a much better job with their products tours/info.

It took me forever to realize it's a magazine.

At least I'm fairly certain it's a magazine. Right? Okay I'm still not sure.

Yeah, I signed up and then whenever I go to start using it I'm too confused. Expecting project management but then not really getting it.

I'm actually super confused by what this is.

had to go into "About" to make sure I understood what it was

Wavelength is a publication for teams who aspire to do great things together—through a mindful, purposeful approach.

https://wavelength.asana.com/about/

> Wavelength is a publication for teams who aspire to do great things together—through a mindful, purposeful approach.

The product may our may not be great, but that tagline is downright horrible. Engineers need to spend more time with marketing folks so that the value props of their products are correctly conveyed to the marketplace.

From reading a few articles, I get the feeling that this is made by marketers, for marketers. Engineering only comes into play because Asana is a software company, but I mean "Epic empowerment: distributing authority to everyone in your company"? That's 100% marketers talking to marketers.

I don't think you're going to get much value from this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing

My main problem with things like Asana is: How should i suggest such a thing for my company, when we will share super duper secret company stuff in there. There is simply no way to do this. Would love to see a nice and polished Team based software like asana, which doesnt feel 'unsafe' for company use.

So you mean a self-hosted solution? What is inherently unsafe about it?

Hosting trade secrets on a cloud-based service, where any Asana employees can monitor your activity, where Chinese hackers (yes, that fear-mongering term actually applies here) can get to your trade data, pre-copyrighted/patented ideas, etc etc is a terrible idea.

If they sold the software maybe you could host it on-site, but having this on centralized servers with many other companies is incredibly risky and generates a huge target.

What makes you think you're going to be able to secure your snowflake instance of Asana in a heterogenous environment better than they can where the costs of getting it wrong are the death of the company?

Obscurity?

An effort to break into a large cloud company storing thousands of interesting accounts has a bigger payout. Attempts to attack such a service will be made more often and with more sophistication than attacks on a smaller company only having one set of potentially interesting secrets.

If your company really values its corporate info so much, it likely already has policies and expertise to secure its own servers. If not, maybe a cloud instance is safer.

Exactly, I even addressed this in my argument. People react and comment before digesting fully.

I don't know if Sandstorm.io has an app like Asana specifically, but they have a pretty good Trello-like app and I think it fits the criteria pretty well for mostly painless self-hosting.

That's why Microsoft has Planner (and Teams [Slack]), because companies are more likely to trust them and already have an account with them.

Well, first, you should consider whether this is actually a problem. I've had coworkers worry about this sort of thing with Travis CI, Coveralls, CodeClimate, etc, the fear being that "they'll have our code and can steal it!!" Took some time to convince them that nobody working at Travis CI gives a shit about our spaghetti code (let alone making it run with no docs!)

If you've taken a hard look at your secret squirrel company stuff and you've decided that 1) these ideas truly are trade secrets worth stealing and 2) they need to be documented in detail inside the product, then yeah, you might want to look at some kind of self-hosted option.

I suspect however that 90% of these concerns are simple hubris, much akin to "sign this NDA before we talk about my startup idea."

Some of us just don't have a choice due to laws or export regulations.

Or we might have client data (even just client names) that we're not allowed to talk about.

If my clients knew I was telling everyone that they run my software, I'd be sunk. And probably sued.

So it's blog, and one that hijacks the back button at that.

Solved by noscript, at the cost of breaking what should be a basic html page.

A back swipe worked for me on Safari on a MacBook. I didn't try the back button, but I think it's the same action.

Love the piece on Work-Life balance being a fractal.

I think you can generalize it for variety of "subjects" for your mind - sometimes work feels better than holiday, and sometimes that book at a coffee shop is exactly the perspective you needed to keep going.

"A publication with purpose"

Yeah, to make Asana money. Textbook 'outreach'

Not sure what this is.

So is this a blog like techcrunch? What is it?

Please don't hijack my back button with your annoying "subscribe" modal.

That behaviour is frustratingly frustrating.

A few colourful words were uttered because of their shady, terrible UX choice.

And all for a few extra email addresses? God damnit, what the hell is wrong with people?

The title doesn't help you guess what you're clicking into, I might gloss it as "Wavelength, a company blog, by Asana, a time-tracking app co."

Good point. I just took the title tag of the page. Looks like the mods changed it.

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