Asana Blog

When I worked at Asana, we created a small framework that allowed for blue-green deployments of Kubernetes Clusters (and the apps that lived on top of them) called KubeApps[0]. It worked out great for us -- upgrading Kubernetes was easy and testable, never worried about code drift, etc. [0] https://blog.asana.com/2021/02/kubernetes-at-asana/ (Not written by me).

remember when they started, they had a few videos showing there amazing new framework "luna" that was going to change the world? https://blog.asana.com/2010/02/lunascript-our-in-house-language-for-wr…

> Typescript has an excellent type system It has a type system. "Excellent" feels a bit strong. https://blog.asana.com/2020/01/typescript-quirks/ https://www.executeprogram.com/courses/typescript/lessons/type-soundne…

Sorry, my bad. Here's the blog post where they announced LunaScript, the ill-fated programming language that they built and then tossed. https://blog.asana.com/2010/02/lunascript-our-in-house-language-for-wr…

> Javascript is great. But... in saying that it has a few quirks and can work in some unexpected ways. Typescript has just as many[1] (in fact more, as it's a superset) quirks than Javascript. I like using it (and it makes JS type-safe-ish), but it's not really some kind of paradigm shift. Not sure how I feel about import maps. They are quite literally the same thing as package.json. In fact, converting between the two takes about 20 lines of code[2]. I'd bet my bottom dollar that everyone's going to use them, which is going to lead to exactly the same types of problems as Node. [1] https://blog.asana.com/2020/01/typescript-quirks/ [2] https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/issues/60

Yes AORs are great and is quite a complete system (rough consensus is nice too but that’s only a part of the solution) - here’s more details on AORs: https://blog.asana.com/2017/12/distributed-responsibility-engineering-…

This is probably the best one we have in public https://blog.asana.com/2017/08/performance-asana-app-rewrite/. If you have specific questions, we would be happy to write a follow up one! A lot of the work we've done has been measuring time from request to finished render.

I'm an engineer at Asana. Trust me, they're full aware that performance is the #1 problem with Asana right now. The major engineering focus at Asana right now is performance. It has been for a while and they're just starting to roll things out with the new, faster, backend and UI. I think you'll start to see significant improvements soon as the investments they've been making start to roll out. It's already started rolling out to some customers, and the API updates just got turned[1], on for example. Those changes are going to be making it into the UI soon. If you don't like Asana performance, give it a few months and check back or keep an eye on their blog[2]. Big changes are coming on that front. [1] https://asana.com/developers/feed/asana-fast-api-open-beta [2] https://blog.asana.com/

We use the concept of 'topics'. A topic encodes: 'The part of the index a query cares about'. For example, given a query like "fetch user where id = 1", there could be a topic like "users:id:1" [1] When a WAL record comes in, we find queries by their topics, and invalidate them. This triggers a refresh. This is inspired by Figma's LiveGraph [2], which in turn is inspired by Asana's Luna [3]. The essays cover the idea in more detail, but you can also start diving into the code, at invalidator.clj [4] [1] This is an example. Inside Instant, we encode them as a 'datalog' pattern. Something like `[:ea "1" :users/id]` [2] https://blog.asana.com/2020/09/worldstore-distributed-caching-reactivi… [3] https://www.figma.com/blog/livegraph-real-time-data-fetching-at-figma/ [4] https://github.com/instantdb/instant/blob/main/server/src/instant/reac…

Pronouns in profiles is at least four years old is some mainstream contexts [0]. I'm unsure that it is a fad because on the internet there can be very little other signaling of someone's gender. [0] https://blog.asana.com/2018/05/new-profile-setting-pronouns-asana/

> I'm just interested in pivot points where companies decided to switch from technology x to technology z, and what made them do it. There's a lot of articles and blog posts on that topic, enough to keep you occupied for a long while. Here's one: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/my-final-post-regarding-the-fla… Here's another https://blog.asana.com/2017/08/performance-asana-app-rewrite/ > I meant, "When did people stop deciding to greenlight new projects using PHP?" Did they, though? I haven't noticed. Do you have any source on that? > Would you be interested in such a chart? No.

This has been tried quite a bit ranging from proquint to random 32-bit phrases [0]. I just don't think we as humans are going to be able to make something both memorable and with enough size to hold, say, ed25519 keys (i.e. Tor v3 keys). KDFs leave a lot to be desired too, we're going to have to find a better way. Until then, obtuse names and lack of easy discovery will plague decentralized setups. 0 - https://blog.asana.com/2011/09/6-sad-squid-snuggle-softly/

I was not in a aware state of mind when writing this reply, obviously if Asana was pulling in $1b+ a year in revenue they'd be valued at an order of magnitude more than $1.5b. Their revenue would probably still be pretty good since they have 50k+ organizations paying $20+ per user per month [0]. [0] https://blog.asana.com/2018/09/asana-company-updates-2018/

Ex-Asana here. Asana has written about the lack of leveled titles in the past[0]. I believe the use of titles is a separate issue to pay transparency. At around the same time, there was an effort to improve the transparency in pay bands. I have since left (for unrelated reasons), and so I cannot definitively speak to whether that was successful. [0] https://blog.asana.com/2017/03/job-titles-asana/

It's easy to make a (poor) copy of the product. It's hard to execute the idea, take market share, and capture customer revenue. Asana blogged this year about 50k organisations, 6 quarters accelerating growth [1]. Back in 2015 they blogged mentioning the heating up 'enterprise collaboration market'. There's countless office tools, diagramming tools, collaboration tools. Even in software there's more CI systems than I can count. My guess is there's a big market which the VCs think is accessible to Asana in a way it's fundamentally not to a competitor. Combined with big growth it makes sense. [1] https://blog.asana.com/2018/09/asana-company-updates-2018/

This could be relevant: https://blog.asana.com/2017/08/performance-asana-app-rewrite/

Dustin did put some of his money into this round: > Us (Dustin & Justin). We’re very bullish on Asana. We each pour a lot of effort into building Asana, every weekday. We speak frequently about our excitement for the company’s future, and we’re excited to put our money where our mouths are. Source: https://blog.asana.com/2016/03/asana-raising-50m-for-work-tracking/

We're in the middle of rewriting our stack to look like this: - TypeScript web code - Using React - Connecting to a custom, to-be-opensourced reactive datastore written in Scala called LunaDb: https://blog.asana.com/2015/05/the-evolution-of-asanas-luna-framework/ - Using to Amazon RDS (hosted MySQL) and Redis as our primary backing stores - Running on top of kubernetes, docker, AWS

does this #newasana twitter contest require entrants to flag their tweets as sponsored? <edit> link: https://blog.asana.com/2015/09/celebrate-with-us-share-the-newasana-fo…

Dragon Drop for Asana Accouncement: https://blog.asana.com/2015/04/breathe-some-fire-into-your-task-list/

I wonder if anyone took that to heart and built it? Maybe ev would fund it? Edit: guess sales force already did http://help.do.com/customer/portal/articles/490143-how-do-i-set-up-a-r… And asana http://blog.asana.com/2012/01/create-repeating-tasks-for-your-recurrin… Though neither is a task template

Thought this was an interesting idea. Does anyone else do this? What are it's pitfalls? Here's a similar post (from 2011) about feature flags: http://blog.asana.com/2011/04/using-flags-to-ease-new-feature-developm…

Their launch announcement is available at http://blog.asana.com/2011/11/introducing-asana-the-modern-way-to-work… . I've written about the launch at http://www.dailywebapps.com/2011/11/03/asana-task-management-for-teams… .

Disclaimer: I work at Asana We have an in house system (LunaDb) which is a little like this. There's a tech talk available about how it works at https://blog.asana.com/2015/10/asana-tech-talk-reactive-queries/ - it's from a few years ago, but the core ideas are there. There's also some details on the caching layer we built for it at https://blog.asana.com/2020/09/worldstore-distributed-caching-reactivi… A few properties based on your questions and the observations here: - We don't attempt to incrementally update query results. Given the number of simultaneous queries the system handles, we've found it much more important to instead by very precise about only re-running exactly the right queries in response to data modification. - We support joins (although not queries of arbitrary complexity). We avoid a race conditions and cross-table locking issues by using the binlog as our source of changes, which imposes a linearization on the changes matching the state in the db. Correctly determining which queries to update for these requires going back to the database. - Performance is an interesting problem. It's easy to arrange situations where total load is a function of "rate of data change" * "number of queries over that data", so being overly broad in triggering recalculations gets expensive fast. We're actively hiring to work on this - if you are interested my contact details are in my hn profile.

Asana (https://asana.com/jobs/eng) | San Francisco, CA . New York, NY | ONSITE Software Engineers (generalists and specialists: mobile, web, api, infra, security) We’re a mid-stage startup (~250 people) building a SaaS product that allows teams to track their work and achieve their most ambitious goals. We are looking to grow our team with engineers and managers who want to build enterprise software that delights users while ensuring the highest level of security, availability and performance. We're hiring across all of our teams in SF and NY, each of which has 2-5 engs at a time and is responsible for projects from inception through launch and beyond. We value technical excellence, mindfulness, and maximizing impact, which leads to an engineering culture that focuses on shipping quickly (and sustainably) as well as mentorship. Our interview process consists of a written test, phone interview, followed by on-site interviews. You can view our interviewing guide at http://asa.na/interview Here are a few links in case you are interested in learning more: Engineering Blog: https://blog.asana.com/category/eng/ Asana's vision doc and where we are going: http://asa.na/vision Our Engineering Values: https://asa.na/14g Our co-founder Dustin on why work-life balance is so important to us: http://asa.na/live-well Please email me at [email protected] if you're interested in our engineering positions.

The main differentiator and focus of the post is "we're making this run in the browser". But nowhere does it explain why that's better for designers. You don't need it to power collaboration features. This echoes Asana and a lot of the "HTML native" product efforts. Which have mostly failed as a technical approach and resulted in a return to platform native apps.[1] What's different this time? Meanwhile this prompts amazed reactions from folks who are technically impressed with how far it pushes the browser. But that was the case with prior HTML native efforts too. It distracts from a critique of the actual product features. I'd like to see a more head to head comparison with popular tools like Sketch. Maybe the built in team collaboration is better than, say, a companion app like Zeplin. But the implementation details don't really matter to customers. [1] https://blog.asana.com/2014/07/mobile-plans/