Scaling Asana.com

[randomdrake]

This is a fantastic approach to the "But how am I going to be able to edit it?" question that inevitably gets asked by clients or bosses.

I've tackled the problem so many times and had so many different solutions depending on the client.

Instead of providing a stupid and bloated CMS to do things I don't want it to do and let the user break things that they shouldn't be breaking, there's this.

I could possibly just provide them with access to edit some markdown with a link or two and instructions on how to make the edits. It puts a bit more burden on the user, but it also means they don't have to pay to run or setup a dynamic and crazy CMS platform too.

If someone could productize this as a service, provide a pretty interface for it, and let it be an easy CMSaaS that gives me, the developer, lots of options and access, but provides a dead simple and easy editor that I could give to my clients, I think that'd be great.

[krausejj]

Statamic actually does include an Admin interface where you can do (basically) this. We really like having the Git version control and we really like the Github editor, which is why we don't use the Admin pages, but they definitely exist in Statamic already.

[jamesmoss]

I'd be wary of using Statamic, at least the admin panel portion. I did a code review of it recently and it's pretty insecure, if you can disable/delete admin.php I'd recommend it.

After a quick look I found a few basic CSRF and session hijacking exploits going back several versions (including the latest). The PHP code is pretty amateur - I imagine somebody with more skill could find many many more holes.

[krausejj]

they've been super-responsive fixing any issues we've found (although we don't use the admin interface)... you should shoot them a message if you have specific concerns.

[leobelle]

A hundred people to work on Asana? Asana is a great task manager, but that's a lot of people. Basecamp for example has 43 people, which still strikes me as a lot of people. I guess having mobile apps requires at least a few people working on each there. A backend team, and the webapp team. 100 seems like a lot though.

[marcog1]

Asana employee here. We have 58 people, about 20 of which are engineers. Even just focusing on engineers, there's so much we'd like to do and growing the team enables us to work on more of those things. It took 3 engineers to build the recently launched calendar feature, for example. And then there are other product features, growth, mobile, platform, data, and a bunch of us working on infrastructure (from keeping the site running to making it fast).

[chubot]

When I started at Google, everybody said the same thing. What do you need 3000 people for? They thought it should require like 50 people. It's just a box on a web page that you type into. But there was a lot going on behind the scenes to make that happen :)

I don't know anything about Asana, but there is this iceberg illusion where people judge the size of a company by the size of the UI. The size of the company is probably more related to the size of its customer base, among other things.

[baddox]

I find that I have a (probably irrational) inclination to think that about virtually every technology company I hear about, regardless of size. This can range anywhere from "how can they employ FIVE engineers, it's just a simple app that does X" to "how can they employ TWO HUNDRED salespeople, it's just a simple website that does Y."

[sync]

I'd be interested in knowing more details. It doesn't seem like some of their pages (e.g. https://asana.com/product ) would be very easy to represent in markdown, especially considering the image carousels.

[krausejj]

Statamic includes a short YAML snippet at the top of the markdown files where you can specify the layout/theme you want to use (or you can just use defaults). The YAML can also include variables that can be used in the theme, such as "Headline," "Subhead," etc... and lists. It's pretty awesome.

Most of the carousels are partials where we feed in some basic variables around copy/image - but since they're at the top of the Markdown file, anyone can change them easily.

[codva]

I got sent an Asana invite from the boss earlier today. Apparently we are going all-in on using it.

[kbd]

You're lucky. I use Asana for my personal tasks at work and I wish we all used it, but the PHBs want burn-down charts and such so we officially use Jira.

[pastylegs]

I do something similar with my own personal site. It's using Jekyll and the repo is in bitbucket. When I commit to the repo, my server is pinged (to a lightweight Flask app) and the server pulls the changes and recompiles the static pages:

http://timmyomahony.com/blog/autodeploy-jekyll-using-bitbuck...

It's surprisingly satisfying

[kaishiro]

Nicely done. I'm literally (seriously, right at this moment) attempting something similar right now. I have a Middleman site building up on Heroku and being served with nginx. That part is perfect. The content is being fed into Middleman via Siteleaf on build, but Siteleaf doesn't yet have any sort of webhook on publish/edit of an article :( I think I'm going to just have to rebuild on cron every 10 minutes or something...

[krausejj]

nice!

[gmjosack]

Often when I try to open Asana it will take minutes to load. I also find it very hard to organize things inside of the product to the point where I prefer vim. There's not way to specify blocking/dependencies and linking inside the product always carries your search context with you.

For small todo style lists it seems fine, if not overkill and if it eventually loads, but for more complex task tracking I just really haven't gotten it at all.

[alexchantastic]

I think this is great. If only more people agreed on writing and maintaining markdown. Often it's the non-technical folks who are driving how a marketing site is run.

[egbert]

Last weekend I actually built a self deploying website with Github Pages, Travis CI and Middleman.

The owner has access to the github repo and can edit everything whenever she feels like it.

No need for a non functional cms, a wysiwyg editor or me for simple text updates!

https://github.com/Egbert/vonb-tv

[geku]

Does something like Statamic exist as open source?

[jeremydw]

I'm building Grow and the Grow SDK (http://growsdk.org) which has a lot of overlap with Statamic (file-based, content in Markdown, YAML things).

One of our tag lines is "develop everywhere, deploy anywhere" – as in, sites are file-based and can be developed locally or in the cloud on our web service. Grow can deploy to a variety of servers (S3, GCS, Dropbox, etc.).

The project's not quite ready for use yet but the SDK will be released as an open source project under the MIT License.

Someone submitted my introductory blog post about Grow on HN a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6562182 – Right now you can sign up for the mailing list, and when a developer preview is ready I'll send out updates. :) I hope to have something ready in a few weeks, actually.

[ericcholis]

http://getkirby.com/ is close, although doesn't seem as polished as Statamic

[alexchantastic]

http://jekyllrb.com/ maybe?

[dylz]

It is open source. You just have to pay for a licence to use it, but it's open source.

[jpeg_hero]

didnt know Asana needed scaling :/