Farewell from Waffle
blog.waffle.io
blog.waffle.io
And yes, I can search, but more often than not the first page of search results are news stories that the service is shutting down rather than resources that describes what it actually was.
They're not "closing"; CA Technologies bought them a while back and now CA is selling to Broadcom, who's killing the product.
Plus, an add-on service like that was just begging for GitHub to add the feature themselves, so the company always had an end-of-life looming.
One possible exit was GitHub buying them, but I'm sure GitHub would rather build the feature natively (as they did, right?) for technical reasons. Another is expanding to a standalone service, but GitHub and Trello already owned each side of that space.
It always looked like a technically interesting product but one that I wouldn't use myself and which had no future.
In discussions, I ask customers to imagine which of the possible outcomes of a VC-funded startup would be good for them as customers (hint: none of the possible outcomes are good for customers, with the possible exception of a rare unicorn IPO).
My problem is that VC-funded startups have money to burn, so they artificially lower subscription software pricing.
It's also faster time to market, because they're able to field entire teams of engineers to deliver what your tiny team is working on much faster. And they can do a lot more content marketing and advertisement that you've no time or budget to get done.
And then when they run out of money they post a blog post on a Friday morning to announce that you need to get your data out of their system by the end of the day. (Edit: in this case 2 months.)
On an off topic note, your site's FAQ says:
> So is this a one-man operation?
> Yes, for the moment it is. Which is actually a good thing, if you're concerned about viability. This means that there are no investors, no burn rate to speak of, no need to shut the company down because the money ran out. It is a mature, long-term project.
FYI my own concern as a buyer would be what happens if you get hit by a bus. You really need to get some kind of partner, or an employee the moment you can afford one.
Please note that getting hit by a bus should be considered in terms of probabilities: while possible, compare it to the near-certainty of "something" happening to a VC-funded business within 3 years, where none of the "somethings" are good for customers.
Are you referring to the date of May 16th given in the blog? That's two months, not one day. (Easy mistake on a fast read. No particular criticism intended.)
I specifically like that it gives us estimates and a Kanban board approach. I also like that they are thinking about the project management workflow as a whole and trying to educate:
- https://www.zenhub.com/book/github-project-management
- https://www.zenhub.com/github-project-management.pdf
It's not perfect, but it's been serving our needs better than Redmine used to and GitHub alone was doing.
No affiliation, just a mostly satisfied customer.
While Waffle and ZenHub are competing products in a way, we both share similar views on the importance of project management being developer-first. It's been a fun journey building in the space along side Waffle and we continue to remain excited about the future of project management in GitHub!
If anyone is interested, you can check out ZenHub here: https://www.zenhub.com/
Not upset, just frustrated that I couldn't do my job, and I wish you'd done some basic accessibility testing on your interface. If that's a gap in your development staff, I'm currently looking for work. Just sayin'. :)
In any case, kudos for creating a quality product that folks I respect enjoy using. I hope that one day I can be among them.
We've started down the path of completing an accessibility audit, and are hoping to use those findings to drive highest priority areas of improvement moving forward. While I'm not certain on timelines , I definitely think there could be an opportunity to engage moving forward and would be happy to keep you involved if you're interested.
If you'd like, you can reach me directly aaron@zenhub.com
So I'm glad to hear that you're undergoing an audit, and I hope that I can someday count ZenHub among the developer tools I can use. FWIW, Slack isn't even in this group, which is shameful given they patted themselves on the back for such a keyboard-friendly interface when they killed off XMPP. No, I'm not bitter. :P
I would migrate to github projects, but last I'd checked some key features were missing from github projects:
1. New issues are added to the backlog column by default.
2. Epics, or anything that allows one issue to have multiple sub-issues.
3. The ability to label one issue as blocking another by using keywords, eg: blocks #123 or requires #321.
Is there a simple way of solving these with probot or github actions?
[probot]: https://probot.github.io
[github actions]: https://github.com/features/actions
Kudos.
(though a simple export to CSV would be better than what most companies do)
We used one view that made issues from four repos appear as one.
This is a feature I'll really miss.
What other product does this? Looking for something.
Always sad to see good products shutting down. Also a bit frightening as I'm about to enter this same market, hehe.
I want to mention what we're building in case anyone looks for alternatives in this thread.
It's called GitSpeak and it's a project management tool which prioritizes developers first. Our goal is to create a PM tool that devs actually enjoy working with, and which saves them time rather than eat time.
Some of our features include multi-repo views, boards, a rich text editor and a neat screencasting option for code reviews, docs, and onboarding. Plus, we are going to be the fastest one out there (we're using Imba.io to build the tool btw).
Check it out here if you're interested:
I'm actually much more concerned about GitHub itself. I still haven't found a good way to back up my Issues. They used to point to joeyh's Haskell program, which is neat but has many severe limitations (like: doesn't support private repos at all). Their current recommendation seems to be a third-party service called "BackHub", whose cheapest plan is more expensive than GitHub Pro.
Text files are a good idea, and I've done that for many of my own projects. You just need to figure out a filename scheme, and a file format (JSON? YAML?). It's great to be able to atomically commit a fix to the source code, and also close the bug report.
I'm not sure how well it would scale. (Mozilla has 1.5M bug reports in their Bugzilla!) At the least, you'd need a local client that could index the text files into a format more suitable for sorting/searching. It would only need to download the diffs, though.
Take your favorite bug tracker and put its offline storage into a git submodule?? I imagine they are all better than GitHub issues which are literally just a forum of threads
I've also been on the other side of things, working for such companies. I've always felt a bit of unease knowing that prospective customers may be taking on more risk than our salespeople were letting on.
I don't know Waffle very well, but if it's just some project management thing, chances are there's a more mature app that does 90%+ of that.