Ask HN: What's a cool internal tool you've built for your company?
5 comments
That's pretty cool, I've tried to do this manually just for personal productivity.
What type of industry/role were you in that you had to keep such diligent track of what people were working on? For freelancing/agency work that makes a lot of sense!
What type of industry/role were you in that you had to keep such diligent track of what people were working on? For freelancing/agency work that makes a lot of sense!
Custom graphics and web design projects. Just had to start the timer, keep track of what we were doing, and submit the final time. With teams, it all adds up, and you can see everyone's time it took on a project and you can all add to the same time record.
Did it ever feel "big brothery" for your team that was on it? Or did it not matter b/c you were being paid hourly
I am salary so it didn't really matter but I reminded myself to only work on that project at work. I did "pick out" a general design template that wasn't too fancy, not too boring, but just needed it to look professional enough as a functional tool.
Everyone had their say in design, colors, etc. They had a say in functionality and things like that. The concept was simple: keep track of time. Then it was my team who suggested: "since we all work on the same projects sometimes, can all of our time count towards the same project and can we see how much time everyone spent on it individually and still know the total time it took?" Definitely.
It's probably got some bugs and could stand to use an update, but I've got too much going on right now. They had a few feature requests themselves, but seeing as we got more back into streamlining jobs at work and less custom jobs, they stopped using it, and I didn't do anything more with it. But as a freelancer and a contractor for different companies and working on some projects with multiple people around the world, allowing them to add to my time entries too allows me to see the workload, what is being done, how much time it takes, etc.
I started it because my boss had been seeking to understand what everyone did besides their main skillset. So she assigned everyone a personal project based on what we told and showed her we could do. She did this so that she could understand how she might use a specific team member for a specific task that was "outside their job description yet part of it." (You all know how that goes.)
While my day job is mostly web design, my night job is web development and technical writing. We streamline our work which takes generally 1-2 hours processing time with a 4 hour total turnaround time, but for some jobs, we were getting "custom requests" or "custom work" from clients, which means they'd want more from the product.
With some CSS or Javascript, nearly everything is possible, but it does take time to do, but most clients might see it as: "Thanks for adding the tab toggle that allows us to scroll through social media without ever going below the fold." That isn't something that just happens in seconds nor is it "point and click". There is actual design and development that need to happen and things that need to connect and tests that need to be done.
Client reality vs. client expectation in terms of what they pay vs. the amount of work they think we did is far from reality, and you may have spent 5 hours on it, but they think you may have spent 5 minutes doing it which is common.
Unfortunately, from the time it was taking to do some research and write the code, get it to work and look good, and actually have a client say, "That's exactly what I wanted and here's the money for the job. I'm definitely happy I helped make your life easier and we were exactly on the same page the first time."
crickets
Anyone? Bueller? Yeah.. the first time a client sees a project, it is expected they won't like it or want to make changes, and so, when it comes to custom work, it's very hard to "get it right" or adjust for all screen sizes or whatever the case may be. When do the requests stop? We pride ourselves on not hardly ever saying, "We can't" or "No". It happens, but we try not to. More importantly, if the requests continue, can we charge for those additional hours outside of the norm?
Hours upon hours and time and money and "doing things just so the client can see how it looks" costs businesses MILLIONS to BILLIONS of dollars every year in lost time or productivity. So our clients pay for an allotment of 5 hours of web design time. After that... well, they can opt to pay more. However, we had gotten so used to streamlining everything and had been doing it for years that when requests were coming in, we were just doing them, and not billing any of those clients for those hours.
And the thing is... you can ask any designer or employee of yours how long something took, and they will definitely give you a rough idea. How long does it take you to do that thing? 15 minutes. 30 minutes. 1 hour. And sure, we can charge the clients that, but we weren't all sure on the amount of time it was taking us, especially if multiple people are working on the same project.
There are tools that do exist to record your time and things like that, but we just weren't using one, and my company was already losing money, so they weren't going to exactly go out and buy any new software, so I volunteered my services. I've been at my job for almost a decade now so brownie points and the like do not actually work for me anymore, I help when I can. So instead, it is more like I have to show that I have relevant skills that they do not need to replace me with anyone else, and that I can do anything they throw my way.
Everyone had their say in design, colors, etc. They had a say in functionality and things like that. The concept was simple: keep track of time. Then it was my team who suggested: "since we all work on the same projects sometimes, can all of our time count towards the same project and can we see how much time everyone spent on it individually and still know the total time it took?" Definitely.
It's probably got some bugs and could stand to use an update, but I've got too much going on right now. They had a few feature requests themselves, but seeing as we got more back into streamlining jobs at work and less custom jobs, they stopped using it, and I didn't do anything more with it. But as a freelancer and a contractor for different companies and working on some projects with multiple people around the world, allowing them to add to my time entries too allows me to see the workload, what is being done, how much time it takes, etc.
I started it because my boss had been seeking to understand what everyone did besides their main skillset. So she assigned everyone a personal project based on what we told and showed her we could do. She did this so that she could understand how she might use a specific team member for a specific task that was "outside their job description yet part of it." (You all know how that goes.)
While my day job is mostly web design, my night job is web development and technical writing. We streamline our work which takes generally 1-2 hours processing time with a 4 hour total turnaround time, but for some jobs, we were getting "custom requests" or "custom work" from clients, which means they'd want more from the product.
With some CSS or Javascript, nearly everything is possible, but it does take time to do, but most clients might see it as: "Thanks for adding the tab toggle that allows us to scroll through social media without ever going below the fold." That isn't something that just happens in seconds nor is it "point and click". There is actual design and development that need to happen and things that need to connect and tests that need to be done.
Client reality vs. client expectation in terms of what they pay vs. the amount of work they think we did is far from reality, and you may have spent 5 hours on it, but they think you may have spent 5 minutes doing it which is common.
Unfortunately, from the time it was taking to do some research and write the code, get it to work and look good, and actually have a client say, "That's exactly what I wanted and here's the money for the job. I'm definitely happy I helped make your life easier and we were exactly on the same page the first time."
crickets
Anyone? Bueller? Yeah.. the first time a client sees a project, it is expected they won't like it or want to make changes, and so, when it comes to custom work, it's very hard to "get it right" or adjust for all screen sizes or whatever the case may be. When do the requests stop? We pride ourselves on not hardly ever saying, "We can't" or "No". It happens, but we try not to. More importantly, if the requests continue, can we charge for those additional hours outside of the norm?
Hours upon hours and time and money and "doing things just so the client can see how it looks" costs businesses MILLIONS to BILLIONS of dollars every year in lost time or productivity. So our clients pay for an allotment of 5 hours of web design time. After that... well, they can opt to pay more. However, we had gotten so used to streamlining everything and had been doing it for years that when requests were coming in, we were just doing them, and not billing any of those clients for those hours.
And the thing is... you can ask any designer or employee of yours how long something took, and they will definitely give you a rough idea. How long does it take you to do that thing? 15 minutes. 30 minutes. 1 hour. And sure, we can charge the clients that, but we weren't all sure on the amount of time it was taking us, especially if multiple people are working on the same project.
There are tools that do exist to record your time and things like that, but we just weren't using one, and my company was already losing money, so they weren't going to exactly go out and buy any new software, so I volunteered my services. I've been at my job for almost a decade now so brownie points and the like do not actually work for me anymore, I help when I can. So instead, it is more like I have to show that I have relevant skills that they do not need to replace me with anyone else, and that I can do anything they throw my way.
I've built a tool to perform automated testing of hardware using Robot Framework. Despite the name Robot Framework it actually isn't really targeted at robotics, but it ends up working out well since you can write your own Python interface libraries!
I've used this method to create automated tests for a variety of projects including industrial machinery, robots, and CAN-based vehicle controllers.
I've used this method to create automated tests for a variety of projects including industrial machinery, robots, and CAN-based vehicle controllers.
I manage 30+ employees, which includes at least 20 software engineers. My team and I eventually built an Employee and Project management software that addresses pain points of managing multiple teams and multiple projects. We don't use JIRA/ASANA or other third party HR tools. We are currently refining these tools for other companies to use also, especially this time of COVID-19.
Nice, what did you not love about jira/asana that caused you to build your own?
First, is about simplicity, ASANA, for example, used to be very easy and straightforward to use, now got more complex than before. JIRA has tons of features, most of it we don't need. We wanted to use a simple tool that focuses on getting things done and enables us to make data-driven decisions.
Second, is we want to have full control over the data and build features custom to our needs.
Third, we don't have to pay per user per month.
Second, is we want to have full control over the data and build features custom to our needs.
Third, we don't have to pay per user per month.
I was one of two developers on a team of 30 analysts and I would regularly get requests to add employee details (name, manager, director, email) to various spreadsheets. It wasn't difficult but it was a tedious process that took away from far more interesting problems.
Eventually I built a small web app that would allow a user to upload their spreadsheet and have employee details added based on some identifier. It was an enterprise so there was at least three unique ways to match someone. I wrote most of it in one night and spent evenings fixing bugs for a week. While it was very useful, it wasn't "core business" so I didn't get to spend any work time making upgrades.
Eight years later, I still get an occasional email but I no longer have access to the source or server. Definitely a lesson in how long shitty code an live.
Eventually I built a small web app that would allow a user to upload their spreadsheet and have employee details added based on some identifier. It was an enterprise so there was at least three unique ways to match someone. I wrote most of it in one night and spent evenings fixing bugs for a week. While it was very useful, it wasn't "core business" so I didn't get to spend any work time making upgrades.
Eight years later, I still get an occasional email but I no longer have access to the source or server. Definitely a lesson in how long shitty code an live.
A remote monitoring library for mobile devices and a collector service, which ingests the data.
The devs can collect metrics and logs on iOS and Android, and send it To the collector service, which will put the data into Prometheus and Elasticsearch.
This helps staying PCI DSS compliant and also ensures the app release cycles are not impacted by third party monitoring libraries, which might not support all iOS/Android versions we need to support.
The devs can collect metrics and logs on iOS and Android, and send it To the collector service, which will put the data into Prometheus and Elasticsearch.
This helps staying PCI DSS compliant and also ensures the app release cycles are not impacted by third party monitoring libraries, which might not support all iOS/Android versions we need to support.
It was excited and my team were the ones who developed and designed it. I just made it work. But I don't really maintain it much anymore. My team stopped using it a while ago and while there was some discussion to build in new features... I just didn't see a need as they were using it less.
I mainly use it for my own projects when I work for clients to keep track of my time commitment. It can be used as a time invoice. So you hit the start button and it logs your time in and you leave yourself a note.
It might be outdated and not work on some browsers, but it still works for me on Google Chrome. A few of my friends sometimes use it to to keep track of time. But when I was developing it, I never build anything specifically branded to something, so I created it as a generic time tracker, and anyone can use it.
https://edithours.com