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Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

Oftentimes I see farewell posts like this, but the company website has already been mostly turned down. It would be helpful for folks like me who have never heard of Waffle to know what the service was. Having that tiny bit of context at the top of the article (or even just keeping the marketing site alive!) helps to put the shutdown in context.

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.

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In short: Trello, but with GitHub integration.

https://help.waffle.io/getting-started/what-is-waffle

But trello has github integration.

Hence the shutdown

Notice they're closing?

Trello's integration is an afterthought and I never found it as useful or simple as Waffle's; they'll be missed.

They're not "closing"; CA Technologies bought them a while back and now CA is selling to Broadcom, who's killing the product.

Exactly.

It didn't always. Products like Waffle and ZenHub came about to meet market needs for better project management with Github. (Waffle launched in 2013)

See also this Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6022522

waffle.io was github projects, built on top of the github api, a few years before github projects. basically a github-based kanban board. It was pretty great if you were a smallish startup.

I worked at a small startup that used it, and I didn't see the point. It was clever in how it provided an alternative interface to GitHub Issues, but to someone who was already familiar with GitHub, it didn't really make anything easier than just using the normal interface. There are things I hate about GitHub Issues, but this didn't solve any of them.

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 case anyone is wondering about this particular case:

https://github.com/waffleio/waffle.io

https://waffle.io/waffleio/waffle.io

Or github repos, showing how to use it but not even a simple paragraph up front stating what it does, or why you'd want to use it.

To be fair not every Github repo cares whether you know what it is or not. Some people just wanted the repo hosting and the public/social aspect was merely a byproduct.

Could be an interesting project to collect & archive these case studies as they’re published...

Same, also from what I gather they've been acquired, so hardly a sad day.

To work on a different team though, with a similar but not identical product I assume.

Try the Wayback Machine.

Glad to see this as the first comment. Was curious what waffle was, so I spent five minutes googling around and going to cache:waffle.io

A very good point. I would like to see that as well.

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