Hacker News Reader

Comment by holyjaw | Hacker News Reader

I would urge you to take another look at the flow of your landing page. I have literally no clue what your product does even after reading the infographic at the top of the page a few times.

- GitHub users want a way to help out on open source projects

- waffle.io places a dynamic badge in your GitHub README file for all to see where they can help

- Clicking that badge takes anyone to your public waffle.io board where users can view and edit tasks.

What?

View on HN

I strongly dislike everything about waffle.io. I feel bad about it, because these are good people who more than likely love their product and it's getting a lot of hate here despite them coming here to respond to feedback... but.

1. Most people here are confused about what this is for. After understanding what it's for, I find that it's not even a solution looking for a problem... it's a force-fed solution to a non-existant problem for most people. This solves something maybe 1% of us have encountered, but makes the assumption that everyone on Github would benefit from this.

2. "waffle.io" seriously? Is this the result of an internal "I need a random english word that is available on .io" poll, or is there a deeper more disturbing connotation with the pronounced blue theme on the site? I'm sure naming your service like this doesn't help the "I have no idea what this is about" crowd. I can't be the only one tired of those completely meaningless names... I mean specifically the hyper-generic names of services targeted at specifically the github/bitbucket crowd. I cannot quite put my finger on it, but some of these names are trying too hard to be cutesy and random. Maybe I'm seeing something that's not there though.

I think that's being rather harsh - to me it's trying to link a Trello style community/team tool on top of Github. And as someone who has tried to get a largish team, including non developers, to collaborate using existing Github features this might well be a good idea.

Also the name - very few domain names seem to have much connection with the domain anymore, picking on this crowd for having a weird domain name hardly seems fair when everyone pretty much has weird domain names these days (unless they have boat loads of cash).

Edit: If anyone from waffle.io is here, first of all well done - looks like an interesting tool, secondly I'm not sure your "Why don't you open source your workflow?" is doing your product justice - I was slightly confused when trying to understand that first diagram, but maybe that's just me. When I scrolled further down the page and saw the example it all seemed clear - but not everyone might scroll down.

Thanks. :) I posted this below, but in case you missed it, we agree. We have a new landing page getting ready to launch. Here's a preview of what we're working towards:

http://screencast.com/t/IZnoWChXyQ

We love Github Issues at our company, but it's missing one thing we really need: metrics. We need to track when a milestone was started, who completed how many issues in a milestone, what was the issue estimated at and what was to actual time to complete. We need data on what there is to be done and what will be done.

That being said, I don't think this is a feature set for Github issues. This is not an open source concern; it's a business concern and I don't think business should drive Github.

So a third party integration is perfect for this. Is this something on the roadmap of waffle.io?

Yep. We're definitely looking at adding more planning functionality and metrics around milestones in the near future.

Yes, because Apple or Trello are much better names.

Honestly, I clicked the link solely because I thought "damn, waffle.io is an awesome name".

Also, I think hooking a kanban board up to github issues is great. Not mind blowing, but definitely nice to automate coordination between the two.

I'm not so sure managing issues is a non-existent problem for large projects. For example, Canonical have Launchpad (also used by Mozilla, MySQL, a bunch of other distros etc.), Django have a custom issues tracker, etc. I don't know if waffle.io is it, but these examples suggest that perhaps there is a point where something is needed beyond Github issues. On the other hand Rails seem to use Github issues alone so maybe you're right.

I agree the landing page is confusing though I believe it's called waffle.io because kanban cards create a grid pattern & waffles also have a grid pattern.

It's an interesting choice as in British Vernacular

Waffle - speak or write at length in a vague or trivial manner.

As a verb waffle has the same meaning in American English but the images of waffles on their landing page make it clear they are going for the food. For me at least it's easy to not jump back and forth between meanings of waffle once I understand the intent is to refer to the food.

Homonyms can be confusing but it helps when such a stark difference in meaning makes it easy to distinguish what meaning is appropriate in a given context.

I think the name is because you end up with a grid of cards. It's a pretty tenuous link though.

I think it's Trello for GitHub, correct me if I'm wrong.

Deleted comment

> Waffle operates as a lean startup - we're moving fast and our product is, too. We're now a full time team (Waffle was originally a summer intern project) operating as an Enterprise Lean Startup within Rally Software. We've pivoted Waffle's direction a bit based on customer need, but we haven't yet launched our new landing page to reflect our learnings.

Absolutely everything in those sentences sounded corporatey. 350+ characters to basically say "We're working on a new landing page".

This is not criticism, because either way I'm not your target audience, but I do hope you have some sense of self-awareness.

Edit: We're working on a new landing page that we think does a better job of describing what our product does and is responsive and mobile friendly: http://screencast.com/t/IZnoWChXyQ

At the risk of sounding too "corporatey" again, but to answer the original question of what Waffle does: Yes, Waffle is a kanban-style, "Trello-like" board view of your GitHub Issues. Waffle allows you to effectively use GitHub Issues more effectively for project management (for instance, the board view helps with prioritizing work and visualizing what in progress. You can also do things like view all of your Issues across multiple GitHub repositories on a single board.)

Waffle uses GitHub Issues as your board's data model, so any changes you make in GitHub are also reflected on your Waffle board (for example, we'll move issues into the "Done" column of your board when you merge any commits into your default branch that use the fixes/solves/closes GitHub Issues syntax.) We're working towards automating even more movement of Issues across your Waffle board based on actions you already take in GitHub.

Congratulation, you don't understand people at all. You wrote all this non-constructive frothy reply without answering the fundamental question holyjaw put forth: > I have literally no clue what your product does even after reading the infographic at the top of the page a few times.

Tank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com