Show HN: We just released + open sourced our internal time tracking app Hours | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We just released + open sourced our internal time tracking app Hours

happyhours.io

36 pointsjurre45 comments

Ok so i'm trying your hosted version of the app. New user. I get taken to the New Entry page...

I haven't got a project, i can't create a project on the new entry page so i have to go round the houses to add a project.

I haven't got any categories... where do i add categories as i can't do it from the New Entry page... oh it's under my name... so round the houses to do that...

once i have done that, adding an entry on todays date (the 8th) then shows a popup that says "Jared worked for 5 hours on blah yesterday"

hmmm

Totally agree that the onboarding experience sucks, we need to improve that

Tracking this here: https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours/issues/132

This seems like it would be good use of the new heroku button: https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2014/8/7/heroku-button

I'm sure some people would like a one-click deploy of this app to their heroku account.

My company also open sourced our time tracking application (it can do more, like vacation requests and invoices). Right now only the backend API is open source, you can find it here [1] and documentation here [2]. It is a REST API secured via OAuth.

In the next few weeks we also want to open source our main client application, an AngularJS app.

It is probably a little too much tailored to our needs to be used somewhere else.

[1] https://github.com/techdev-solutions/trackr-backend [2] http://techdev-solutions.github.io/trackr-api-documentation/

Oh that's also pretty cool! Props for open sourcing it

First impression: feels undifferentiated. It doesn't seem to be particularly quick on the data entry, or particularly powerful on the analysis and reporting side. Perhaps there's something great about it, but if so at least I didn't get the message.

I don't understand why do people keep tracking time through web apps.

I built Zone ( http://rinik.net/zone/ ) because I couldn't find any product where you could track time really quickly.

I love Zone, I just wish that it could track what applications I'm using and for how long.

Thanks for your work!

Thhanks. Have you tried RescueTime?

Looks really nice!

Haha, this is funny.

I interned 1 week at this company in 1991 as a 'snuffel-stage' while in high-school ( Kraneweg at the time ).

Congrats on the App!

That's awesome! :D

It was awesome, they really went out of their way and teamed me up with someone every other day:

Monday: Desktop publishing with Ventura and LASER printers. Yes: laserprinters. Tuesday: Hit the road to install network at a client site with Coaxial cables. Wednesday & Thursday: Let me sit in with the dev guys: TurboPascal. Friday: Assembling PCs.

Still wondering if they pulled a trick on me with the mystery customer showing up.

Fond memories & have been in IT all my life.

That's exactly how I imagine that era, feel free to drop by for a coffee if you're ever around (we're @ zuiderpark now)

The github project is over at https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours

Would be helpful to have license information in the readme. What license is it under?

You're right, totally missed that! Let me double check at work in a few minutes but I'll probably add an MIT license with a disclaimer to please don't be a jerk and offer a paid hosted version yourself

So you'll give us the permission to go commercial with your code and call us jerk if we actually go commercial?

He grants the rights to go commercial with their code, but reserves the right to call us names for doing so. Still sounds like a good deal to me.

Name-calling rights are far too often forgotten in modern day contracts, I'm afraid...

I think that's one of the barriers that prevents code from being released: People (like myself) worried that others would take that code and compete with you.

Than use a different license that explicitly forbids that. Or force them to get your permission first. Using an open-source license is not mandatory

Don't use a license you don't want people to exercise. In fact I don't quite understand why you would open source the project at all if you are going to actively discourage people from using the code in ways that are permitted by common open source licenses.

If you don't want anyone else to make money from the project perhaps designing your application in clear parts and releasing them as open source libraries would have made more sense. Releasing the whole thing as open source, encouraging contributions while wanting to be the only one able to profit from said source seems wrong. Wordpress don't stop others making money from hosting.

We've added an MIT license without a disclaimer, people are free to do whatever they please with it.

I too am developing an automatic time tracking application (for the Linux desktop, but I think it might be made to work cross-platform): the idea is that, you just install it, you might then optionally choose apps or files to identify your project activities, and it will auto-detect time spent within those apps; it will come with a pre-populated database of known apps so that it can handle most common activities automatically.

It works by monitoring current processes, and checking the title of the currently focused window, applying a number of regexes to identify an activity, and saving results to a database. It should be able to handle screen savers, visited URLs, and automatically take snapshots of unidentified windows so that you can later map them to a known activity.

I envisioned this tool for personal use; however, it could be deployed to monitor employees in a centralized manner, though this might even be illegal in many countries.

I can imagine that could be nice especially for freelancers or just to track your own productivity!

Our use case was more that we have a lot of different projects and we didn't really have any insight on how we were spending time within those projects. For example we wanted to know if spending more time on prototyping would cut down on development time or why one project took a lot longer than another.

For programmers this is a time tracker built into your text editor https://wakatime.com

I think this would have a lot more value if integrated with ticket tracking systems which already contain a little of interesting information - type of tickets, type of work, component etc..

The problem with integrating time tracking with other business systems is that outside of software development the tools utterly suck for integrations. Integrating with calendaring apps or task management or CRM is either really hard because there isn't a public API or the tools are very basic because the API has to easy to use, or the system is expensive to develop for being the API is complex. Plus the API ends up dictating how you organise the data rather than the business choosing how to use the tool - eg 'every job must be part of a project that's owned by a client' .. that sort of limitation quickly makes the tool inflexible and hard to use.

If you look at integrating with software development tools like ticketing or bug tracking you have to remember that in the majority of companies, even if you only look at software companies, most people aren't developers once you get to more than about 10 staff. You have sales and admin and managers. What that means is that you either end up with a time tracking tool that does very little outside of tracking time or a time tracking tool with a raft of features that don't apply to most of the people using it. Both of which are bad for some of the users.

All of this is compounded by the fact that most people don't want their time to be tracked. Even if you love your job, having someone reviewing how you spent your time feels like you're being micromanaged and watched over. That just isn't a good feeling.

Time tracking is a surprisingly hard problem to solve once you get past just a log of 'On A/B/C worker X worked on Y for Z hours'.

BUG report in trial: when i click on edit profile or categories i get signed out (latest Chrome on Linux). Probably the click is registered as a sign out.

Looking into it, haven't seen that before! Thanks for letting me know!

It's really nice that one can host it on their own server, what are the minimum requirements? For example, 1 GB ram? Gitlab, another rails app, for example is a bit better with more. Are there any features that Hours offers that Harvest doesn't?

We're hosting this on Heroku, I think you should be fine on their free instance which has 512mb I think? :)

Haha, i noticed "Intern Overleg" on one of your screenshots. It's probably a strange word for non-dutch speakers ;)

It looks okay though, but i haven't tested it just yet.

Hello from Belgium ;)

Haha yes you're right! It's a screenshot of our actual instance of Hours, maybe we should update it ^^

Also noticed the two different icons being used (compare the 'clock' in the logo and the favicon), doesn't seem to a lot of thought is put into it. It's these little details that users like me - who are usually willing to pay for services like these - are put off because most probably these details are just the ones on the surface. I'll probably stick with http://www.tickspot.com

Oh that also looks great! :)

"Time registration that doesn't suck" - is an oxymoron.

No privacy policy at all? That's an absolute 'NO'.

You're right, tracking this here https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours/issues/135

I'm sorry, but your app lacks a lot of required functionality. Even for a lightweight time tracking app.

The statistics are very pretty but not very useful. The lacking of printable, full reports on project bases, is a dealbreaker for me. Also add a text field to the time entries, tags are often not sufficient. Also no date filtering? Only full hours, no half hours? The sidebar says I logged time for yesterday, if it was actually today. The edit userprofile link doesn't work.

Haven't you tested your app at all?

Thanks for your feedback, yes we've been using it for about six months now and it's been working for us. Feel free to submit a pull request with anything you think is missing :)

The sign out on edit is a new bug, we're tracking it here: https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours/pull/131

I'm not going to help you build missing features, so you can profit of other people's work by hosting the paid app.

What you have at the current state is not an MVP, it's a buggy prototype. Why should I use a time tracking app when I can't export my hours to write an invoice?

Invoicing is not something that we personally need, if you do need that sort of functionality there are tons of alternatives out there :)

The code is MIT licensed, so your contributions would be too. Sure they can make money off it, but so can anybody else who feels like forking (or even just pulling) the code.

If you find it a good base to work on, submit pull requests. If it's not for you, just move along.

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