Asana

Scaling a Mature iOS Codebase with Tuist

Six months ago, it usually took 45 seconds to make a change to a feature in the Asana iOS app and rebuild it. Today, it usually takes 15 seconds. The Mobile Foundations team achieved this by migrating our Xcode project to Tuist and splitting the code into several modules, enabled by some modest refactors. In […]

Security > Stability > Performance > Functionality

When I was interviewing at Asana, I had the question that many security practitioners do: does Asana really care about security? For many of us, this isn’t some appeal to an abstract ideal, but rather about our daily work. It’s hard to show up every day when your work isn’t appreciated, or when you’re overworked […]

What is an Area Tech Lead at Asana?

Since joining #teamasana 4 months ago, it’s become clear to me that successful areas (groups of engineering teams with a shared goal) tended to have many things in common, including the presence of an Area Tech Lead (ATL). ATL’s have similar technical expertise to staff engineers at other companies, and they use that expertise to […]

Revamping engineering manager onboarding at Asana

An engineering manager’s success impacts an entire team or group of teams, so setting them up for early success is a high-leverage investment. For most of Asana’s existence, “engineering manager (EM) onboarding” meant attending general engineering onboarding. Their manager would create a custom 30-60-90 day plan and pass on critical information in regular 1:1s. This […]

Security and Compliance: Better Together

Many security practitioners have been frustrated by bad compliance audits, where an auditor wants something that is impossible, or nonsensical, or simply not worth implementing. Or when they accept a security control like the keypad above when it clearly does nothing to prevent anyone from accessing what that keypad was intended to protect. At Asana, […]

What our interns built this summer: Meet our 2021 intern class

Every summer, we host a group of interns on our Design, Data, and Engineering teams, who work alongside full-time Asanas to do everything from contributing to highly visible feature launches to contributing to our app’s stability and reliability. There are so many exciting and impactful projects here at Asana that no one is relegated to […]

Grow your leadership impact as a Tech Lead or Engineering Manager

Forming the right partnership between an Eng Manager and a Tech Lead can accelerate delivery and personal growth, but it isn’t easy, because this relationship can take many forms. At Asana, we’ve always been a big believer in distributing responsibility across the organization (through Areas of Responsibility), and that we’ll build a better product if […]

Introducing EM building blocks

At Asana, we have found using Will Larson’s staff engineer archetypes helpful for thinking about and discussing experienced engineer career growth. And the question arose: could we do something similar for Engineering Managers? Similar to individual contributors, engineering managers (EMs) also have different shapes of impact. It’s valuable to illustrate the variety of growth opportunities […]

App Components: A new way to build more focus and flow

Today, we are launching App Components in beta to make it easier for developers to keep tools and workflows connected.

Asana’s Tech Stack: How we build a collaborative app for teams of all sizes

An overview of Asana's current engineering architecture along with some of the problems we’re working on today.

Data retention and cleanup in Asana’s Data Lake

Learn 3 ways Asana's Infrastructure Engineering team implemented configurable data retention and cleanup for Asana's data lake.

How we built Asana’s Marketing Measurement Capabilities to power global customer growth

Growing a customer base at scale effectively and efficiently through paid advertising is challenging in the modern digital world. It requires robust and holistic marketing measurement to give marketers visibility into how their campaigns perform at different granularities in a timely manner.  Paid acquisition plays an essential role in helping Asana reach our potential customers […]

How Asana helps me feel included as a Latina in Engineering Management

Denise Carolina Videtta, Engineering Manager at Asana, reflects on her experience as an underrepresented software engineer and building community in the tech industry. Read about the elements of workplace culture that make her feel valued, included, and that she belongs at Asana.

My internship on Asana’s Engineering team

Get a peek into the day-to-day as an intern on our Engineering team, the challenges they solve, and the impact they make at Asana.

Validate your iOS and Android translations with Locheck

Does your iOS or Android app ship in multiple languages? Asana wrote & open-sourced Locheck to catch bugs for you. See how it works.

How Asana uses Asana: Security incident response

Read how the Asana Security team uses Asana to run incident response, written by Asana's Head of Security, Sean Cassidy.

Using Envoy to route internal requests

Learn how Asana routes requests across the globe with our service-oriented architecture, service-mesh abstraction layer, and Envoy.

How Asana uses Asana to manage code reviews

Learn how Asana's Engineering team built SGTM, an open-source tool, to help the team manage code reviews seamlessly in Asana.

The growth journey of an Engineering Manager at Asana

An Engineering leader gives insight into the growth path of managers based on her 10 years of career growth at the company.

How our Security team solved a Central InfoSec CTF challenge

Our Security team takes time to build their skills & have fun together every month. See how they solved a Central InfoSec CTF challenge.

Asana’s Engineering Manager Community: Helping our team grow and thrive

Our Engineering community plays a key part enabling our managers to have high impact and develop their craft.

How Asana allocates engineering responsibilities transparently

Learn how we developed a process to allocate engineering responsibilities in a fair, transparent, and consistent way.

☀️ FAIR Process Guide

At Asana Engineering, we take a systematic approach to allocating responsibilities, and we're sharing our process template with you.

How we scaled a key data pipeline with a people-first approach

Asana's Data Science team rewrote a key system to improve consumer usability and data quality, improving team collaboration at scale.

Asana Engineering Growth Paths

At Asana there are growth opportunities for Engineers regardless of background. Meet some of our Engineering team members who share their journeys and advice for other Engineers who are trying to expand their careers.

Scaling Scala: How we chose our backend language and tooling

The number of engineers writing Scala at Asana has increased from a single team to almost every engineer—here's what we've learned.

How we use Kubernetes at Asana

This post explores the problems Asana's Engineering team aimed to solve in Kubernetes with our KubeApp framework.

How Asana ships stable web application releases

Much of Asana's product code is shipped as a single web release. Learn how we do it and how our application stability & deployment systems work together.

Meet our 2020 summer intern class

Meet Asana's first fully remote summer intern class and learn about the impactful projects they worked on as part of the team.

Part 2 – WorldStore: Distributed caching with Reactivity

Part 2 of how we implemented distributed caching in a fully reactive framework.

Part 1 – WorldStore: Distributed caching with Reactivity

Part 1 of how we implemented distributed caching in a fully reactive framework.

Meet 3 of our Engineering Program Leads

Meet Asana's Program Leads and learn about this unique leadership role for individual contributors on our Engineering team.

10 tips for setting engineering goals from Asana Head of Engineering, Prashant Pandey

Asana Head of Engineering, Prashant Pandey shares his advice for setting clear, actionable engineering goals.

Why I joined Asana: Kshitij Grover, Software Engineer

Meet Kshitij Grover, a Software Engineer from our San Francisco office. Read this blog to learn why he chose to work at Asana!

How to thrive as an intern while working remotely

Asana Engineering interns share what it was like to work remotely, what they learned, and their advice for other interns.

Meet our Mobile Engineering team

Get a peek inside how Asana's Mobile Engineering team works and builds the Asana Android and iOS apps from team lead Bella Kazwell.

How we modified our infrastructure to deploy an EU data center

See how the Asana Engineering team modified their infrastructure to deploy a new data center in Europe.

Asana & Techqueria: Partnering to support Latinx engineering mentorship

We’re excited to work with Techqueria to support Latinx engineers in tech. In 2020, we began by hosting a panel about Latinx mentorship in engineering.

Meet our Security team

Asana's Head of Security, Sean Cassidy, shares how the Security team keeps our customers' data secure and the technologies they use to do it.

How I advanced my career through AsanaUP

Hear from three people who went through the AsanaUP program, an apprenticeship that provides a pathway to software engineering roles at Asana.

TypeScript’s quirks: How inconsistencies make the language more complex

Asana engineers are TypeScript fans, and we’ve learned a lot about where TypeScript shines and struggles. Here are 3 of our favorite TypeScript surprises.

Asana ❤ open source

Discover some of our favorite Asana open source projects & learn about the engineers who built them.

Welcome to Asana Engineering

At Asana Engineering, we aim to build, operate, and scale the most useful software for the world’s teams. We learn so much by building and using Asana that we wanted a place to share the things that have helped us along the way.

How leading an ERG at Asana accelerated my career

Software engineering manager, Steven Rybicki shares how his his ERG leadership experience at Asana helped shape and accerate his career.

What does a day of collaborating with Asana look like?

Visualizing collaboration in Asana across day of week and country can provide a peek at how different teams work together.

My software engineering internship experience at Asana

Read why Kenneth Lu, a software engineering intern, chose to launch his career at Asana and join full time.

What our interns built this summer: Meet our 2019 intern class

Every summer, we have a class of interns join our engineering team. They work on important and impactful projects, contribute to feature launches, site stability and making the codebase a more pleasant place to develop in. This year we had our largest class yet: 25 interns across engineering, data engineering, and data science teams. As …

Recent downtime & what we’re doing to prevent future incidents

As Asana continues to scale our operations, we’re conducting a number of infrastructure enhancements, including expanding our data centers to improve reliability.

Asana takes on Vancouver with a new development center

Learn about Asana's Vancouver Development Center and here how we are scaling our company culture in the Pacific Northwest.

Details on the July 29 and August 1 downtime

Asana had downtime twice in the past week, 2 hours on July 29 and 50 minutes on August 1. We are continuing investigation, but want to let you know what we understand so far, and what changes we have made and are making to prevent a recurrence in the short-term. Both of these incidents were …

Why I joined Asana: R.J. Aquino, Engineering Manager

R.J. Aquino is an Engineering Manager at Asana. Read more about his journey from San Francisco to Vancouver and why he chose to work at Asana.

One second a day: My first 30 days at Asana

When I started my role as an Engineering Manager at Asana just a few months ago, it was clear to me that Asana creates a truly memorable onboarding experience. In their book, Moments, Chip and Dan Heath share that there are ingredients to creating special and memorable moments in our lives: Connection: Moments of connection …

Why I joined Asana: Rishika Dhody, Data Scientist

Meet Rishika Dhody, a data scientist at Asana. Read more about her journey and why she chose to work at Asana.

Celebrating International Women in Engineering Day at Asana

Asana Celebrates International Women in Engineering Day

Real Talk: Asana women on engineering leadership practices

What does it take to be an empowering engineering leader? Here’s what 4 women engineering managers had to say on the topic at our latest Real Talk event.

The Asana Engineering Guide to Intern Mentorship

We’re really proud of our internship program; a staggering number of our interns over the past 7 years have ended up as great engineers in various forms of leadership, both at Asana and elsewhere. So, we thought, let’s share the love. We’re sharing our internal guide for intern mentorship that we use in pretty much …

The Timeline of a Feature Launch

Timeline is Asana’s most complex visualization to date. Inspired by the classic Gantt chart and motivated by the same challenge of allocating work and resources, it is a feature-rich, interactive tool designed to help users plan, track, and allocate work over time within a project. To do so, users create, place, and move tasks arbitrarily …

Product Engineering internships are great!

Every year, our incoming interns have a chance to talk to our Engineering teams and indicate their preferences so that we can match them up with good mentors and interesting work. We find that many people don’t have a clear idea of what they want, and request to be on “backend” teams that sound related …

Why I joined Asana: Kate Reading, Engineering Manager

Kate Reading is an Engineering Manager at Asana in San Francisco. Read about Kate's passion for productivity & supporting her team to be successful.

Details on the January 22 outage

On January 22nd, 2019, Asana was unavailable for multiple hours. Here's what caused the outage and how we resolved it.

Hiring engineering managers: Crafting an interview process to build the best team

Engineering managers are crucial to the success of an engineering org. Here's a look at our approach to management philosophy and interviewing engineering managers.

How to make smart compromises when scaling your engineering culture

Want to scale your engineering culture while continuing to grow your product? Hear from Asana’s Engineering Lead, Bella Kazwell.

Architecting product tours in React: How we moved fast without leaving a trail of tech debt

In-product tours are notoriously difficult to build right. Here’s how we quickly built Asana’s architecture without leaving a trail of tech debt.

Let your users mark up images on iOS with Drawsana

We recently released Drawsana, an open source iOS library in Swift to add image markup features to your own iOS app. Here's how it works.

Understanding the data behind notifications

We took a look into how we can make notifications better. The first step for us was understanding how people are using our notifications right now.

The things we built: Meet our 2018 summer intern class

Find out what our 2018 intern class built this summer and get a glimpse of what it's like to work at Asana.

Transparency 201: Know your audience

You make many decisions every time you share information with your team. This post is about audience: who you share information with and how.

Leading cross-team changes

There comes a time in every software company’s life where you need to make a large change to your application. These large scale changes often require alignment and cross-team engineering changes across multiple teams to achieve the desired result.

Considerations for implementing pronouns into My Profile Settings

Considering adding pronouns to your product’s profile settings? Learn how Asana incorporated a free-form text box and why.

Hiring engineering managers: Crafting an interview process to build the best team

Engineering managers are crucial to the success of an engineering org. Here's a look at our approach to management philosophy and interviewing engineering managers.

Distributed responsibility: An engineering manager’s perspective

See how distributed responsibility works in practice, allows for full ownership, and contributes to an environment built on transparency and trust.

Three pluralization mistakes that are messing up your code

After recently internationalizing our codebase, we’d like to share 3 common mistakes to avoid when using pluralization logic in your application.