PaceRank

A new milestone reached! I've completed the telemetry collection functionality for Windows, with Linux following shortly. It has been a fun experiment to figure out when a user is working with programming tasks vs other activities on their computer. And I believe I've found a good way.

The client also handles authentication against the online service so that it's authorized to send in telemetry data for a user.

Next up:

• Build a simple GUI for the telemetry app, so that users easily can add folders to watch, and authenticate against the online service.

PaceRank has now gotten a brand with logotype and a direction for the product design.

Much of the code for authentication/authorization, registration, account management, and service infrastructure in GCP has been written. Also some code of the authentication part of the web app has been written.

The functions of the telemetry client is written for Windows and Linux. It sure was a fun challenge to work with the Windows DLL API, even though it's a mess. Now the GUI needs to be created.

Once the product has reached MVP status, I'm going to open source the client so that people can see what code they run on their computers. Hopefully I can get help from the "soon-to-exist" community to build plugins, or improve the client. ✌

Todo for MVP:

• Finish digest service for telemetry data
• Build service to get statistics
• Build web app interface
• Finish telemetry client for Windows

I estimate the MVP to ready for release in July. 💥

I decided for a name without doing proper research. It shows that the initial name PaceDuty is very similar to a company named PagerDuty.

PagerDuty has global brand protection for it's name within the same classification as PaceDuty.

Because of this I've switched my name to PaceRank instead to make the brand rely more heavily on social aspects of measuring time.

I often hear that design and logotypes ain't important for the MVP. Get the product out first, then iterate on design and "non essential MVP tasks".

I do agree with the sentiment, but I do think design and UX is important for the MVP. Products are used by people, and if it ain't easy to use it's not a product that's good enough for most people.

Working as a freelance programmer has enabled me to free up some time that I can dedicate to the project, and it's awesome!

I've come to an agreement of working 80% with my current client. That means I will dedicate at least a day every week to produce an MVP for this project.

I've been inspired by other members on indiehackers and I'm now going to tackle a problem that's not really new in any way - Time tracking.

I've always found the time trackers I've used throughout my career to be lacking in features for me. I want tracking to be automated to a big extent and I've always found myself forgetting to turn trackers on and off, especially on those occasions where I work on several projects a day.

I'm sure I can build something that I want to use, and therefor I've started this project.

Wish me luck! 😊