Weirdly, just a couple of hours ago I was trying to find this as an alternative "recommendation" for a buddy whom is digging around in this space. Couldnt remember the name of it, except that I had used it a while back for some simple lottie related work (and a couple of other simple tasks)... After trying various iterations of search terms that included the word "lottie" (and spending much longer searching than what I expected to) I eventually clicked through some link and landed on the Synfig site. And now, coincidently, this post shows up :)
Nonetheless... I have no idea of how this really compares to other tools, but when I have had a need, Synfig was a breeze to use for what I needed it for. Importantly, it was quick to get started with, and without needing to spend hours in tutorials trying to figure out how to do things.
So happy user and all that :)
While I can agree that starting as a new hire can be daunting, there should not (theoretically) be a case where a single colleague stonewalling a new hire is a problem. At least in an org set up correctly for remote work. Smaller teams (or those with a single decision maker) are more susceptible to failing this, but thats a management problem that needs to br highlighted and addressed.
And requires management to be actual people and process managers, and not psuedo manage by following some random guides and ticking off items on a checklist and "managing" by graph/stat outputs and only attempting to make some dashboard green, lines moving in the direction etc.
As for allowance of some slack, yeah, theres possibility for that to happen. But management doesnt need to be intrusive: what does anyone care if some employee is working a 2nd job for example? Does anyone care how their colleagues or staff spend their time away from work as it is? As long as their work is done within acceptable timeframes (or there is reasonable limiting factors preventing it) , its of sufficient quality to meet expectations, and they meet expectations of availability, what they do in their spare time is none of anyones business. In other words, so long as someone is not breaking company requirements/policy (which would include working on competing products, etc), whether they hack away on side projects, volunteer their time somewhere, work a 2nd job, do nothing... it doesn't particularly matter. Management only needs to measure performance relative to the org's expectations of performance for that position, and timeously address any concerns if need be. Theres no need for the org to reach beyond whatever is agreed to for that role.
Not to take anything away from the launch of this offering, but I tend to find that project management for freelance work and any self managed project (whether as a solo dev or within a small group) that is intended to generate income requires a little more than just managing tasks/activities. Managing costs, availability, etc tend to be important as well.
For freelance and small contracting work, and then lately for my own side projects and such, I've been running a self hosted instance of OpenProject. It has 2 features that I find are extremely valuable:
1. resource and materials costs
2. Gantt charts
Having costing available is extremely useful for paid gigs: not only for budgeting purposes, but also indirectly in keeping scope creep to a minimum (or alternatively, being able to indicate how much the additional effort is actually going to cost based on task estimates, and having informed conversations with the client if needed).
And gantt charts seem to not be used as much these days, but its really helpful in getting a quick overview of how changes to a projects tasks (new tasks added, delays,
resource planning constraints, etc) affect the project timeline.
For the most part, I tend to find that increasingly, "project management" tools are more actually "task management" tools. Which have their uses. But for project management, there's more to a project than just its tasks.
NZ is a member of 5 eyes IIRC, and so likely have various relations/cooperative agreements in place that make it easy(-ier) for justifying the handing of citizens over to another state.
For personal use, and on the topic of Obsidian, I rolled my own form of this... Its quick and dirty, but generally works for my usecase. I tend to push a page through turndown [0] to generate the markdown, then write this into obsidian (also storing things link a copy of the rendered page, link to the source, etc).