Crick, a time-tracker dashboard, goes open-source | Hacker News Reader

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

tailordev.fr

46 pointscouac18 comments

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).

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) 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.

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...

Good point! In a previous article, we do have a few Gifs: 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.

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. :)

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?

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).

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

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."

Do you mean this? http://orgmode.org/

Can you track time with it?

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-co...

Yes, although Org calls it "clocking".

They said half of Org mode. It might be the other half that's actually the important part. :)

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

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

Best.

Thanks!

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/... probably instead of https://app.crick.io/

Thanks, this should be fixed now!

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

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