Cronboard

Today, after a massive update, Cronboard is finally feature complete. Work is far from over though!

What this means is that now we've all got an MVP containing all features that I envisioned for the product.
It's a little bit more polished than a MVP should be, but what the heck 🚀

The latest feature to make the list is Alerts & Issue notifications:

👉 Any issues detected in your Cron schedule are now recorded and you'll be notified
👉 You will get a list of suggestions on how to resolve each issue or find the cause
👉 You'll get a concise weekly report including issue and execution summaries for your tracked projects
👉 New notification settings are available to make sure you only hear about what matters most

It feels good to have made it this far! 🥳

A larger chunk of future efforts will go into marketing and spreading the word. Hoping to get many people on board as we're polishing the product and finalising features.

❓ Any suggestions on how to approach this?
❓ What's the best way to get the word out?

I'm sure you have valuable experience or tips to share and you I'm will be very happy to hear about it!

After a couple of months of hard work the first major update of the platform is out! Based on beta tester feedback we set out to improve a number of things.

Here's what's new with the project:

🔥 The dashboard UI has been refactored and simplified to improve UX. Complex logic has been hidden behind the scenes to make the user interactions and simple and clear as possible.

🔥 We've added metrics and some charts to better present information for your project's background processes

🔥 Our frontend-to-backend communication goes exclusively over web sockets now which has reduced server load greatly and has improved user experience. This coupled with numerous performance optimisations to the backend has made everything feel much snappier.

🔥 We've updated our landing page and have included several video presentations for some of the main features of the platform, and how they've changed after the update.

🔥 Our project infrastructure is now largely automated allowing for quick service scaling when required.

And since one can't really progress without learning anything new we'd like to share some tips & links that may be useful to anyone. They were indeed very useful in the development of this update:

👉 Whenever doing UX - ask yourself what the main goal / scenario for the given screen is. Try to list all actions available to your users in order of importance, and make sure the UI structure reflects that.

👉 Do a global review of your application's database calls. Their number has likely grown in the course of development, and they might have also changed. You might be able to achieve great performance improvements if you review your database indexes and how your query for information.
If you happen to be working with Laravel - we found the following course very useful when trying to improve performance: https://courses.serversforhackers.com/scaling-laravel

👉 We've tried many solutions to create a product demo video, and we'd like to share how we end up doing our own. The most simple and free way of recording you app's UI we found was the RecordRTC Chrome plugin. The resulting file you can process using simple tools like https://handbrake.fr/ and iMovie. Finish that with Youtube's AudioLibrary and you've got all the tools and ingredients needed for a nice demo video.

We hope you'll find something useful in the above, and would love to have you onboard to try out product!

Often life happens and we're not really able to do the work that we would like to. Such was the case with Cronboard, and for better or for worse its development lingered for a few months.

👉It would be interesting to share - what helped you push through and restore your motivation?

I'm happy to say that I'm back at it again, and hopefully this time I'm on the final stretch 🚀 I've started a larger marketing effort in a bid to get as much people as I can trying out the project. I doubt it would just come down to adding the project in many places. There's definitely ways to be more effective, and I'm planning to read up on that. 🤔

👉 Do you have any suggestions on how to gain a wider audience? It would be great if you could share articles or other content that helped you with this!

The project itself is in a good place and I'm eager to connect with real users and start a discussion going. A discussion like that would help in providing the best product for my users' use cases.

I hope everybody is keeping safe and using their time wisely!
As for me - I'm feeling the excitement rise again and it feels good! 🥳

Today the project was made public on different social media and relevant websites. This is the first time that I've announced it publicly outside of Indie Hackers and it is both scary and exciting!

I can't wait to see what people think of what I've built in the past months, and am even more interested to see if people would like to try it out.

Let's see if everybody is as excited to tinker with it as I am!

Much has changed from my last update. After some user feedback and a bit more research about what's available on the market I decided I need to complete the list of base features that I had originally planned.
This resulted in me spending even more of my limited free time to make everything as good as I can, and ready for a private beta release.

I learned quite a bit during this process, but tried not to spiral down into the hole of making everything perfect. The important thing for me was to get the base functionality out the door, and improve on that as I go forward.

I'm happy to say that I've accomplished that goal! All features are there and provide a very good base to determine where the project will go in the future. I've been trying it out on my own projects and it's been a very useful tool. I can't wait to start sharing it with other people and to get the first set of feedback on it.

It is time and starting today the project is officially in beta!

After a long period of development I decided it's time to start showing it to people. The project is in an early MVP stage, and has some of the core functionality ready to go. The next step is to see what people think of it, and maybe also to see if anybody would be interested to try it out at this stage.

Towards that goal I've set up a simple landing page that describes the basic concept of the service. It lets people express their interest to try the project, and if they are up to it - help shape where it's going.

Very excited to see if I'll be able to help somebody else along the way!