Posted by Richard White
Wed, 03 Oct 2007 08:51:00 GMT
Over my frantic and sometimes shrill protests, a schooner full of performance issues docked with the server Monday morning. Not even a peace offering of copious amounts of RAM would satiate these foul bytes and they’ve since held the whole place hostage with their insanely slow response times.
(I’ll never be able to write for ErrTheBlog /sob)
I’ve did a boatload of performance optimizations over the last two days that I just loaded up on the server which should hopefully put and end to the suffering.
I’ve testing this release quite a bit, but as with anything that includes radical backend changes and a compressed time frame there exists a certain amount of risk. That said, if you notice anything odd about how SlimTimer is working please email me straight away.
Posted by Richard White
Tue, 18 Sep 2007 23:46:00 GMT
/trumpets
Myself and Lance, Underpaid Genius CTO and Tech Lead on ActiveScaffold, are taking on consulting gigs again in …
User Interface / Interaction Design
Ruby on Rails Development
- From Kiko to SlimTimer to Underpaid Genius—we’ve worked on a lot of Rails apps.
- We’ve released Rails plugins, most notably ActiveScaffold (and previously AjaxScaffold) so we know the internals of the Rails stack (too?) well.
Drop me an email to tell me about your kickass project and how we can help.
Posted by Richard White
Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:57:00 GMT
We’re looking for people who use SlimTimer for their business to join our cadre of “Underpaid Geniuses” (aka Friends of Underpaid Genius). Here’s what you can expect from membership in this exclusive group:
- You’ll help us understand your software needs by filling out a survey or through a short phone interview (or over coffee/pints if you’re in the Bay Area).
- You’ll be invited to and be able to influence the early alpha and beta versions of the product.
- You’ll received benefits like free premium accounts, t-shirts and other shwag.
We’d like to hear from everyone but we’re especially interested in talking to people/businesses who aren’t developers or designers (we still love you though!) such as lawyers, writers, business consultants, photographers, et cetera.
If you’re interested please email friends@slimtimer.com with a short blurb about your business and what software you use for things like project management, time tracking, invoicing and expenses (eg: SlimTimer, Basecamp, Blinksale, Quickbooks, etc).
Posted by Richard White
Tue, 17 Jul 2007 21:41:00 GMT
Here’s the update on a few issues that were unresolved in our initial post about converting
SlimTimer from free to freemium:
- We’re NOT going to put a usage limit on any of the existing actors in SlimTimer (Tasks, Entries, Reports, Tags, Sharing, etc) in the free version
- We may add Projects to and put a usage limit on those (ex: we may limit you to only have 3 active projects in the free version)
- We’re initially looking at premium versions that add reliability, support and security: SSL, backups and email support.
We’re currently focusing most of our time on Underpaid Genius, save for bug/uptime fixes on SlimTimer, so actual implementation of the freemium tiers won’t be immediate.
Posted by Richard White
Fri, 29 Jun 2007 09:28:00 GMT
We passed two major milestones yesterday: our millionth SlimTimer hour was logged and we had our first ever widespread incident of data loss. Ugh!
What happened:
- Due to what I’ll call ‘operator error’ we lost all data on any tags or tasks created after June 28th 04:00 GMT
- We stopped the server to repair the database using nightly backups to fill in the gaps the best we could
- We created a script that would create ‘recovery’ or dummy tasks to be placeholders for the tasks that we lost and give us something to attach your time entries to.
Who’s affected:
- 360 People had tasks that were lost and now have placeholder tasks, with names like ‘[Recovery 190]’, in their places
- More people may have lost tasks if they were created yesterday but not linked to any time entries
- All tags added yesterday to both tasks and time entries were lost.
What you need to do:
- If you have any placeholder tasks you need to rename those and add any tags, coworkers or reporters that may be missing
- Check over your entries from yesterday and re-add any tags that may have been lost.
If you’re one of those 360 people you’ll be getting an email from me shortly, but anyone should feel free to contact me with any concerns they have.
We’re working on making sure this doesn’t happen again and increasing our database backup regularity.
a million apologies..
Rich
Posted by Richard White
Fri, 29 Jun 2007 03:00:00 GMT
...until further notice. Hopefully no more than an hour or two. Will keep you posted and apologize for the lack of warning.
Update 1: We’ve had some data loss and are pulling the backups to patch things up best we can. At this point it looks like we didn’t lose an entries but we did lose any tasks or tags that were created today. We’ll do our best to recover as much as possible.
Update 2 (6:17 GMT): I’d estimate we should be back online by 9:00 GMT.
Update 3 (9:14 GMT): Doing some final tests should be back up momentarily
Update 4 (9:30 GMT): Back up! Check the next post for the aftermath.
Posted by Richard White
Mon, 25 Jun 2007 15:44:00 GMT
We’ve been experiencing some heavy performance issues for the last hour starting at about 15:00 GMT (Monday 25th). You may see extended loading times or browser timeouts. We’re working feverishly to get this worked out and will keep you posted.
Update: The issues we were having resolved themselves shortly after this post went up. We’re setting up extra monitoring to give us more resolution should this problem crop up again. I am happy to report that our existing monitoring tools noticed the problem and were able to get us out of bed in time to address it.
Posted by Richard White
Wed, 13 Jun 2007 06:01:00 GMT
I’ve often alluded to some big plans for SlimTimer and it’s finally time to peel back the curtain a bit.
Earlier this year, I sat down with social application guru and world class freelancer Stowe Boyd to talk about SlimTimer and where I was planning on taking it. He thankfully convinced me to drop some of my preconceived notions and to make a push to take things to the next level.
And that’s what we aim to do, take things to the next level by building a totally new application.
We’re taking what we’ve learned from SlimTimer about lightweight time tracking and applying those principles to the other side of the coin: finances. The application, affectionately named Underpaid Genius, will offer time tracking, budgeting, invoicing and financial analytics tailored to the needs of freelancers and small consultancies (who make up 3/4 of SlimTimer’s users):
- More traditional Customer > Project > Task hierarchy
- Set hourly rates or flat prices for Projects and Tasks
- Time Tracking (derived from SlimTimer)
- Tracking of time budgeted vs actual time spent
- Financial Analytics
- Financial Dashboard
- Invoicing
... and other cool super secret features which we’ll talk about more when we get closer to launch.
I’m very excited these days because, in addition to getting Stowe on the team, I managed to talk Lance Ivy, the technical lead for ActiveScaffold, into signing on to be our project code wizard. This means I know we’ll have some uber clean code on the backend but more importantly it means I’ll be free to focus exclusively on the user experience which completely rocks!
This news has major implications, all good, for existing SlimTimer users?
- We should have a better level of service for SlimTimer and be able to update things more frequently with an extra developer on the team.
- We’re planning on monetizing the service so we have no plans to stop working on it or drop it even after Underpaid Genius launches.
- When Underpaid Genius launches we’ll provide a way for you to painlessly transfer your data if you so choose, so you can continue blissfully using SlimTimer.
So get excited, but hold tight and we’ll keep you posted.
Posted by Richard White
Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:11:00 GMT
I’ve got some good news and some bad news.
You want the good news, eh? I admire your spirit …
I’ve decided to take this operation to the next level, that means incorporation, hiring other developers, and big plans for the future which will be revealed very shortly.
Now for the bad news, SlimTimer is going from a free to a freemium service.
That means that, like many other web 2.0 properties, there will continue to be a free version of SlimTimer but there will also be premium (paid) service levels.
Monetizing SlimTimer was always on the table but my original desire was to make SlimTimer’s premium tiers be completely feature based and not usage based. What I’ve found out is that there’s a reason almost all freemium services have some sort of usage component in addition to providing extra features: people don’t pay for features because they generally don’t know if what they’re worth it without using them first. Makes sense.
What I do I mean mean by usage component? Here are some popular web 2.0 tools and the usage components that figure into their freemium tiers.
- Basecamp: # of active projects, file storage
- Blinksale: # of invoices per month
- Wufoo: # of forms, reports, fields and entries (phew!)
- Tick: # of open projects
In addition, to a usage component there are a couple features that are pretty standard on premium plans like email support and SSL (on the higher premium tiers) which SlimTimer will copy. In addition, if we roll out integrations with other applications, such as QuickBooks, that may be something that becomes a premium only feature.
So you want to know what’s going to be limited in the free version of SlimTimer?
The truth is, I don’t know…. yet.
The obvious answer would seem to be that the number of active tasks should be limited.
Unfortunately in SlimTimer the number of active tasks currently reflects more about how people use SlimTimer (using many fine grained tasks vs using a task per project) rather than how much they get out of SlimTimer. Also, it has the undesirable side effect of incentivizing the use of as few tasks as necessary rather than being very granular. I find that to be unfortunate since I’ve always been pretty happy with SlimTimer being fairly agnostic about how you use tasks and letting you determine a system that works best for you.
Some other ideas (not saying they’re good ones) would be to limit the number of…
- Reports Run
- Hours logged per week
- Entries created per day
- Tags
- Shared Tasks
- ???
... but I’m not really happy with any of those ideas.
I even considered letting people name their own monthly price for what they felt SlimTimer was worth to them. I still really like that idea, but it’s creates a lot of overhead in the billing department and I’ve been told that I’m being too idealistic.
I’m going to go back to my lab and ruminate on this, but I’m really curious to see what you guys (and gals) think about this. How you feel about the switch tofreemium? Any ideas on what should be limited in the free version? Any other ideas that I may have missed? What’s fair?
I’m going to follow the comments here closely and post again next week with a resolution, hopefully! Also, stay tuned for the long awaited and oft mentioned “next big thing” post, which I’ve actually already written. :)
Thanks for being SlimTimer users. It’s about to get a lot more fun!
Read our update on this issue
Posted by Richard White
Mon, 21 May 2007 21:22:00 GMT
I’ve added a handy little checkbox that adds a lot of horsepower to reporting: You can now use your friend’s (coworkers/reporters) tags in your reports. This is the first step to dealing with the flood of requests I’ve had for shared tags between users to make task sharing easier.
I’m investigating taking this one step further and making tags shared throughout the rest of the application not just on reports: there would be one set of tags for a Task shared amongst all the people associated with it. I like the idea myself, but I’d like to hear from you before making a decision so please leave a comment with your thoughts.
Enjoy.
