4 ms·

Crick, a time-tracker dashboard, goes open-source

46 points by couac 9y ago

couac 9y ago
Hi! I am Will, co-author of the blog post and tool(s). A long time ago, we asked our intern to develop a time tracker as a CLI, given that we spend most of our time in the terminal and also to give him something fun to do. He designed a great time tracker that we now use daily: Watson (https://github.com/TailorDev/Watson https://github.com/TailorDev/Watson). Our business involves billing clients per days (7h a day). Watson was our source of truth but sometimes we needed to aggregate reports of different developers. Crick (https://github.com/TailorDev/crick https://github.com/TailorDev/crick) to the rescue! These open source tools were part of a much bigger project that never took off. Watson was open source per se but we thought we could maybe create Crick as a paying-product. We conducted interviews and decided not to do that: nobody really needed such a tool. Well. We needed it so we developed it and decided to open source it.
- hardwaresofton 9y ago
  Hey would you mind providing some sort of demo of crick? After looking through the article, repo,etc and heading to app.crick.io I can't see what it looks like for the life of me...
  - couac 9y ago
    Good point! In a previous article, we do have a few Gifs: https://tailordev.fr/blog/2017/06/07/le-lab-5-crick-a-backend-for-watson-time-tracker/ https://tailordev.fr/blog/2017/06/07/le-lab-5-crick-a-backen.... Edit: I added a Gif on the (GitHub) README too: https://github.com/TailorDev/crick https://github.com/TailorDev/crick.
  - justinclift 9y ago
    Yeah, trying to get an understanding / demo of it... the site wants an account created first. (For me) that's a "not going to happen" until after I've seen what it looks like and have some idea whether I'd find it useful. :) EDIT - There's a quick visual animated gif of it on the GitHub repo README. It would probably be useful to have that (or similar) on the front page of the app.crick.io website too for not-logged-in users. :)
- tustlem 9y ago
  Hi Will, I've been using this today to track my hours and really dig the simplicity in Watson on the CLI and clean UI in Crick. I don't bill hourly but I'm interested to track how I'm spending my time. It'll be interesting to see if anything emerges over time. One thing I haven't been able to figure out is after syncing to Crick, how can I delete a project from there?
  - couac 9y ago
    Thanks for the kind words! > One thing I haven't been able to figure out is after syncing to Crick, how can I delete a project from there? We are aware of it, and we do not have a solution yet. We built Crick in a week so we had to cut corners... We focused on the happy path. Things will get better in the future (as we use these tools).
blm 9y ago
The first link to "Crick" seems to take me to a "Page not found" page(It links https://tailordev.fr/blog/2017/08/02/crick-goes-open-source/app.crick.io https://tailordev.fr/blog/2017/08/02/crick-goes-open-source/... probably instead of https://app.crick.io/ https://app.crick.io/
- couac 9y ago
  Thanks, this should be fixed now!
gnuarch 9y ago
Watson reminds me of Timewarrior. https://taskwarrior.org/docs/timewarrior/ https://taskwarrior.org/docs/timewarrior/
- jmaupetit 9y ago
  Hi! Julien, I am a co-author of crick/watson. You are totally right, and you're not the first one to mention it. Note that some people have integrated taskwarrior with Watson, see https://github.com/yloiseau/watson-utils#on-modify-watsonpy https://github.com/yloiseau/watson-utils#on-modify-watsonpy Best.
  - gnuarch 9y ago
    Thanks!
delta1 9y ago
Slightly off topic and with respect to both the authors, and Philip Greenspun: "Any sufficiently complicated time-tracking program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Org mode."
- couac 9y ago
  Do you mean this? http://orgmode.org/ http://orgmode.org/ Can you track time with it?
  - CogDisco 9y ago
    Yes, although Org calls it "clocking".
  - aphistic 9y ago
    They said half of Org mode. It might be the other half that's actually the important part. :)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - delta1 9y ago
    Yes indeed you can "clock in" to your Todos as you work on them, and then generate a "clock table" to see what time you've spent where. http://orgmode.org/manual/Clocking-commands.html#Clocking-commands http://orgmode.org/manual/Clocking-commands.html#Clocking-co...
welder 9y ago
Can it work without manually running start? Like automatically know when to start?
couac 9y ago
Hi! We noticed that many users could not create "Teams".. It is fixed now, sorry for the inconvenience :(

46 points by couac 9y ago

Hi! I am Will, co-author of the blog post and tool(s). A long time ago, we asked our intern to develop a time tracker as a CLI, given that we spend most of our time in the terminal and also to give him something fun to do. He designed a great time tracker that we now use daily: Watson (https://github.com/TailorDev/Watson https://github.com/TailorDev/Watson). Our business involves billing clients per days (7h a day). Watson was our source of truth but sometimes we needed to aggregate reports of different developers. Crick (https://github.com/TailorDev/crick https://github.com/TailorDev/crick) to the rescue! These open source tools were part of a much bigger project that never took off. Watson was open source per se but we thought we could maybe create Crick as a paying-product. We conducted interviews and decided not to do that: nobody really needed such a tool. Well. We needed it so we developed it and decided to open source it.

hardwaresofton 9y ago
Hey would you mind providing some sort of demo of crick? After looking through the article, repo,etc and heading to app.crick.io I can't see what it looks like for the life of me...
- couac 9y ago
  Good point! In a previous article, we do have a few Gifs: https://tailordev.fr/blog/2017/06/07/le-lab-5-crick-a-backend-for-watson-time-tracker/ https://tailordev.fr/blog/2017/06/07/le-lab-5-crick-a-backen.... Edit: I added a Gif on the (GitHub) README too: https://github.com/TailorDev/crick https://github.com/TailorDev/crick.
- justinclift 9y ago
  Yeah, trying to get an understanding / demo of it... the site wants an account created first. (For me) that's a "not going to happen" until after I've seen what it looks like and have some idea whether I'd find it useful. :) EDIT - There's a quick visual animated gif of it on the GitHub repo README. It would probably be useful to have that (or similar) on the front page of the app.crick.io website too for not-logged-in users. :)
tustlem 9y ago
Hi Will, I've been using this today to track my hours and really dig the simplicity in Watson on the CLI and clean UI in Crick. I don't bill hourly but I'm interested to track how I'm spending my time. It'll be interesting to see if anything emerges over time. One thing I haven't been able to figure out is after syncing to Crick, how can I delete a project from there?
- couac 9y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! > One thing I haven't been able to figure out is after syncing to Crick, how can I delete a project from there? We are aware of it, and we do not have a solution yet. We built Crick in a week so we had to cut corners... We focused on the happy path. Things will get better in the future (as we use these tools).

blm 9y ago

The first link to "Crick" seems to take me to a "Page not found" page(It links https://tailordev.fr/blog/2017/08/02/crick-goes-open-source/app.crick.io https://tailordev.fr/blog/2017/08/02/crick-goes-open-source/... probably instead of https://app.crick.io/ https://app.crick.io/

couac 9y ago
Thanks, this should be fixed now!

gnuarch 9y ago

Watson reminds me of Timewarrior. https://taskwarrior.org/docs/timewarrior/ https://taskwarrior.org/docs/timewarrior/

jmaupetit 9y ago
Hi! Julien, I am a co-author of crick/watson. You are totally right, and you're not the first one to mention it. Note that some people have integrated taskwarrior with Watson, see https://github.com/yloiseau/watson-utils#on-modify-watsonpy https://github.com/yloiseau/watson-utils#on-modify-watsonpy Best.
- gnuarch 9y ago
  Thanks!

delta1 9y ago

Slightly off topic and with respect to both the authors, and Philip Greenspun: "Any sufficiently complicated time-tracking program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Org mode."

couac 9y ago
Do you mean this? http://orgmode.org/ http://orgmode.org/ Can you track time with it?
- CogDisco 9y ago
  Yes, although Org calls it "clocking".
- aphistic 9y ago
  They said half of Org mode. It might be the other half that's actually the important part. :)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- delta1 9y ago
  Yes indeed you can "clock in" to your Todos as you work on them, and then generate a "clock table" to see what time you've spent where. http://orgmode.org/manual/Clocking-commands.html#Clocking-commands http://orgmode.org/manual/Clocking-commands.html#Clocking-co...

welder 9y ago

Can it work without manually running start? Like automatically know when to start?

couac 9y ago

Hi! We noticed that many users could not create "Teams".. It is fixed now, sorry for the inconvenience :(