Waffle.io

» see waffle.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Waffle.io read your GitHub repository and drew a kanban board out of it. That was the whole product. The columns were your issue labels, the cards were your issues and pull requests, and dragging a card moved the label. There was no second database to keep in sync, because the board was a view of the repo rather than a copy of it.

In 2013 that was close to magic. GitHub had issues and milestones and nothing resembling a board, and the alternatives were Jira and Trello, both of which lived somewhere else and both of which drifted out of sync the moment a developer closed an issue without touching them. The first archived capture of waffle.io is from 27 June 2013. I was writing code through that whole window and never used it, for a boring reason: the repos I worked in were small enough that the issue list was the board.

The team kept building past the board. The farewell letter lists automatic work tracking and pull requests connected to the issues they closed, along with build statuses on the cards and deployment tracking. GitHub shipped Projects in September 2016 and it was, at first, considerably worse. Waffle was still ahead on features when the decision came.

~ the case file ~

~ four owners ~

Waffle was not sold, and it was not short of money. It was switched off by the fourth owner of a company it had never worked for. Waffle started as an accelerator project inside Rally Software Development, the Boulder agile-tooling company. CA Technologies bought Rally in 2015. Broadcom bought CA Technologies in a deal that closed in November 2018. Each of those transactions was about something enormously larger than a GitHub kanban board, and the board came along as a rounding error in the asset list.

The farewell gave two reasons. The second is the real one. First, that the market was leaving less room for tools like Waffle. Second, that it aligned best with Broadcom's strategy to stop supporting Waffle as a standalone product and fold the good parts into Rally, formerly Agile Central. The Waffle team was reassigned to Rally to do exactly that. Nobody was fired and nothing was wound up. The team moved desks, and a product with paying customers was declared out of scope.

~ the letter ~

The announcement went up on 16 March 2019 and the Wayback Machine caught it a dozen times inside two hours, which is what a shutdown notice looks like in the crawl record. It opened "Friends, With a heavy heart" and named the date in the first sentence: 16 May 2019, at which point the service would become completely unavailable.

Most of the letter is given over to a list of things the team remembered. In the summer of 2014 they accidentally deleted everybody's "In Progress" column, and not only the English ones, then spent two feverish hours of scripting and MongoDB work restoring them before deciding to ship nothing else that day. A Waffle food truck at GitHub Universe in 2015 left people unsure whether they were a software startup or a catering business. By 2018 people were stopping at the booth for their annual renewal of Waffle socks.

The practical terms were generous. From 22 March every paid feature went free. Subscriptions were canceled with the stored card details deleted, and annual GitHub Marketplace customers got pro-rated refunds. The team built a migration path with GitHub that converted a Waffle board into a GitHub Project with the same columns and cards. And then, under all of it, in the footer of the goodbye letter: Copyright 2019 CA. All rights reserved. The sign-off was from the Waffle team. The copyright line belonged to a company that had itself been swallowed four months earlier.

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