Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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