Kaneo – An open source project management platform | Hacker News Reader

Kaneo – An open source project management platform

kaneo.app

152 pointssaturn5k67 comments

Echoing others: screenshots, demo that doesn't require data harvesting (ahem, "sign ups").

Personal feedback:

* Docker Compose is sufficient for a Quick Start, but not production installation. Needs substantially more documentation about production-ready setups at the very least, especially security considerations.

* Would also add additional Quick Start guides for Kubernetes.

* Documentation should also cover rationale behind prerequisite choices. RabbitMQ is Broadcom's domain, and there's a lot of sour grapes out there who want to steer clear of them, MPL-licensed or not. If alternatives won't be suggested or offered, then at least explain why a given piece was chosen so other builders can explore contributing alternatives.

All in all, the essentials seem to be coming along nicely. Just take the time to document, document, document now, so you're not treading technical debt later should its use take off.

You can enter any data in the "register" form as long as it validated (e.g. mail@made.up), it lets you in anyway without mail verification.

Then just give me a button to try anonymously

For anyone who wants my username and password, I tried the following for both username and password. Feel free to use this as your demo (remember your scout's promise though).

billg@microsoft.com

Edit: looks like I managed to break my instance without even trying. I can't edit my first task that I created.

https://demo.kaneo.app/dashboard/workspace/nyxfpvfgkk412xg4n...

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Log in as billg@microsoft.com 
  2. Click on workspace Microsoft Blue 
  3. Click on project DataCenters 
  4. Click on the first task, DAT-1 Build data centers around the world 
  5. Observe the screen just says "Task edit" with nothing else there.

I didn't meant for anyone to post their credentials under a fake email, but thinks.

It's the webpage that should be friendlier to people who just want to toy and explore their app before committing to get it running in production.

Hey, thank you for your feedback and I agree. This project is still under heavy development and one of the lovely HN people opened an issue regarding this. I'll get to make the demo accessible without any accounts. Thank you!

You have the button, you just don't like it. I tested it anonymously, and the priorities should not be the anonymous demo login button. They are very far away from that bike shed.

It's an internal tool. How much does your task manager really need to scale?

Yeah, was thinking that as well. IMHO, compose.yaml is the best balance of convenience and simplicity if you need one (or even "several") instances. You should only get more fancy if you need to deploy `n` instances with auto provision/load-balancing/failover/etc.

It seems to me that converting docker-compose to kubernetes is fairly straightforward too.

Hey, thank you for the feedback. I have created an issue to add a quick start for Kubernetes as well. Most of my decisions behind this project is to make it super "dumb" and easy to use. Thank you so much for the feedback!

Ah, I was thinking more from the perspective of the consuming party ;)

Though of course it’s nice if you pre-add it, it’s nothing people can’t do themselves.

Everything has to go in Kubernetes these days… usually at the request of users who lack the relatively trivial skill to convert a Compose definition into a set of Kubernetes resources.

Or Product Managers/C-Suites/Directors who believe Kubernetes is the future of computing and if it's not in there it's garbage that should be thrown out.

Source: Senior IT Engineer who likes K8s as a concept, but is incredibly disappointed with its unnecessary complexity and everyone's insistence on its use without understanding its role or purpose.

I was onboard before reading RMQ.. less keen on using that, perhaps we can swap it out with somethnig else.

It seems to just have named it RabbitMQ but speaks AMQP https://github.com/kaneo-app/app/blob/v0.1.0/apps/api/src/ev... and I know ActiveMQ supports AMQP <https://activemq.apache.org/components/artemis/documentation...> probably a bunch of other brokers do, too

> * Docker Compose is sufficient for a Quick Start, but not production installation.

As an author of a DevOps tool [1] based around Compose files, I beg to differ! It should be pretty easy to adapt the config from the README to use in medium-scale production setups [2] (the only thing that comes to mind is a reverse proxy perhaps).

I think I’ll add Kaneo to the Lunni Marketplace after some more testing!

[1]: https://lunni.dev/

[2]: Read: small to medium sized businesses, startups without a lot of funding etc.

The example compose file has no database

No external database. It does use SQLite, which is okay unless you’re making a SaaS with thousands of users, and maybe even more, given it uses RabbitMQ for the writes. [1]

The Compose file sets up a volume for it, so the data is persisted correctly.

[1]: If everything’s set up correctly, there shouldn’t be concurrent writes to the SQLite db, and it should scale pretty well then. (The RabbitMQ + SQLite stack is a bit weird, I agree.)

I would also add to this list of annoyances that new despicable trend to replace the "See on Github" familiar button into a "Star on Github" button that tries to steal a star.

I thought they might make their own issue tracker public to show a glimpse of it… But they seem to use GitHub issues instead, which is pretty ironic.

Strange comment about RMQ; a message broker that has been used widely for almost 2 decades

So I bring that up from the perspective of IT, not Product. RabbitMQ isn't something I've seen directly deployed much in the enterprise IT world (not saying it doesn't exist, just that I've not seen it in any prior org myself as a separate component like the Docker Compose cites), but I will say that many Managers/Leaders will just see "Broadcom" on that page and run away screaming like they do from Oracle's stuff.

With documentation on why it was chosen and the function it serves, I (the IT Engineer) am better able to communicate this back to leaders pitching a fit over Broadcom's name on there as well as brief on alternatives. Not saying it's right, just a frustrating reality.

I was super interested in this, but I bounced from your landing page after about 30 second. Echoing what everyone else says:

- Put screenshots on the landing page

- If I click "Try Demo" I just get sent to a log in page and I have no idea what to do next. I don't even want to try a demo, I just want to know what the damn product looks like. If I've got to create an account just to see your product, that's an instant bounce from me.

Fixing both of those would be ideal, but fixing even one would be a massive help.

I literally went "no screenshots, ugh. Oh there's a demo page, maybe the demo speaks for itself, oh login/register nah" and went to the comments here

Me too

Me three

Hello, sorry for not making the demo accessible without an account. Currently there's an open issue which I'm working on to do so. This project under heavy development, sorry for the troubles.

Hey y'all, I'm Andrej. The developer behind Kaneo. Sorry for not inserting any screenshots. Honestly this software is still in beta and I'm still working on this. Thank you for the feedback. I had

- I will remove the sign ups for the demo - Add more screenshots

This is a passion project as someone mentioned. I love open source and it will always stay free. Hopefully I'll be able to share it whenever it's complete it.

PS: I had no idea this was posted here

Thank you all.

The fact that it is trending on HN despite the lack of adequate Kandi g page material indicates there is demand for such an app. Keep working on it!

agree, the feedback is a sign of market demand. thanks for sharing this, going to check it out :)

> Kandi g page

landing page

Appreciate it must be frustrating to get a lot of (repeated) suggestions for things that are already further down your todo list.

Let me add one and a half. : )

Comparison / advantages (even if anticipated rather than current) over competitive products in this space, which I assume are things like Planka, Kanboard, and other similarly generous and responsibly licensed kanban/project-management tools.

Tangentially related, in your documentation a discussion around your architecture decisions - f.e. rabbitmq, sqlite.

This looks fantastic. Thanks for open-sourcing this. For a passion project this looks really polished and well done.

I know a lot of people have crazy expectations from open-source projects these days - and many of the comments here echo those, but you can gradually evolve it at your own pace. You don't owe folks anything.

Hi Andrej, thanks for building this and congrats on getting to the first page!

I’ve signed up for the demo and here’s some feedback:

- Forms should display some kind of feedback while being submitted. Maybe put a spinner on the button? To test that it works correctly, you can set up net throttling in the browser devtools.

- Onboarding could be more straightforward: instead of the Create your first workspace screen, just show the form directly. Same with the first project: you can even show the form while the workspace is being created perhaps, to minimize the wait.

- Right now, every reload blocks on a GET /me request. Looking at a spinner for a few seconds doesn’t feel great! Perhaps you can cache current user data? (you can then update it in the background, a-la SWR)

- By the way: maybe returning password hash in GET /me isn’t a great idea :^)

- On the project page, it seems to connect to the same websocket endpoint 5 times. I didn’t read the source code yet but I think there’s something weird going on with the state management?

Hope this helps! Let me know if you need anything.

If a GRAPHICAL software project doesn't have screenshots I'm not even considering deploying it

"No screenshots, no interest"

I wish you could do the demo without having to sign up

Bounced out so hard. Not even any screenshots on the first page.

No screenshot, no video, can't middle-click on any of the links. This is a terrible landing page!

I hope the product is different, but I have no way to find out since no public demo.

The feature cards trying to look like stacks is also weird. In addition, I would expect clicking on (say) “Visual Task Management” to show a page with a more detailed description of that feature, along with screenshots showcasing it. Lastly, the page doesn’t seem to support light mode.

Here's some screenshots I took: https://imgur.com/a/gpbQ1cZ

Saying in the nicest way op, this just looks like todoist with a more focus on modern AMOLED/OLED/dark theme.

Congratulations on the release. While I echo the sentiments from others that screenshots or a video would've been very useful, the signup works without an email confirmation which is great, so I was able to see how the interface looks like. It has a very linear like feel https://linear.app/.

- If you could deploy a demo that doesn't require a signup/sign in, it'll make things a lot easier. You can reset it every x hours.

- The feature list is empty as I can't see what it offers or a comparison to other tools.

- After creating a task, I can't edit it.

Project management is very complicated and there's different groups of users, which one is yours? Those who need a full fledged jira with sso? they won't self host and won't care if it's open source. Small shops that need something cheap? Hobbyists or students?

I'm selfhosting vikunja https://vikunja.io/ at the moment. Opensource and supports my selfhosted sso.

You can find more here

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab...

Once again kudos on releasing and opensourcing it.

> Those who need a full fledged jira with sso? they won't self host and won't care if it's open source.

Not necessarily true. Id like to replace jira in an enterprise environment and we do need sso and prefer to self host.

What's stopping you moving to self hosted?

Jira used to be self hosted, dunno if they still are, but this space for a self hosted enterprise product is already pretty saturated so you should have lots of options.

Screenshots where? Insert asking ape meme

Homepage needs a brief demo video in the hero section

Looking at the GitHub project, this looks to be a passion project more than a community driven one. It's great to see a project like that getting some eyes and potentially attracting contributors. If anything, the main website is a little misleading in this regard.

Little technical nitpick - I would have prioritized moving off of a shared-volume sqlite database before introducing a backend message queue.

When trying a demo of some online tool, I'm always a bit sad to land onto an empty space devoid of any trial data. Please authors out there: think about offering a pre-populated demo instance instead, so that it's much simpler to see what the app looks like for real. Also, an interresting data set speaks more in favor of your project than a black screen.

I got the same issue than already reported: When trying to edit a task, all I got is a black screen saying "Task edit". Nothing seamingly related in the JS console.

Also, I was mostly interrested to have a look at the "project timeline" but it's not obvious where to access that. Same goes for the automation part. How to access that?

After cooling off for some days, I made the demo open for everyone. I'm still trying to process all the requests.

Again, thank you HackerNews, this is a dream to me and I can't believe the traction this projected received.

The point of demo is to make it as easy as possible to try your product. Having people register really defeats the purpose. Either get rid of login phase for demo, or at least prefill input fields with some demo user/password pair.

Would be cool if this had a terraform script and was deployable to an AWS serverless stack (lambda, lambda SSE for sockets, SQS, Aurora serverless, cognito).

It would be surprising if anyone broke out of free tier and it makes hosting a breeze.

> Click on the website

> After spending 20 sec on the website i have no idea what the app look like

> Leave

The "Features" and "Community" links don't navigate/ scroll anywhere for me. Using Chrome 133 arm64 on macOS.

As an aside, is it just me or do a lot of these new project management apps coopt Linear's style? Not saying that this is completely derivative, the website just gave me those vibes (and I won't sign up to try out the demo so maybe some screenshots on the front page would be nice :P)

Hey, thank for your feedback. This product wasn't meant to be posted since it's under heavy development. I will add some more screenshots and make the demo possible without signing up.

Again, please add screenshots And, for the demo, add some meaningful data.

After I clicked on the demo link, I want to be able to use all functions

Are the "Features" and "Community" links at the top supposed to not work? Firefox, MacOS

Same on Chrome/Win11.

+1 on screenshots and not requiring data harvesting. I was intrigued, but lost interest quickly.

Quick tips : You homepage should be the product on "demo" mode without any login.