I've released my own product - Trackyt.net
I’ve not been blogging for awhile, not because I’m too lazy but because I’ve spent all the time for my own first release. And today I’m very happy, proud and excited to announce that Trackyt.net is now available online.
Trackyt.net is a simple time management application. I’ve chosen this idea while I was working on my self-study project, just because it is well known, something I can use for myself. Latter on I started to feel that I see a bigger picture, bigger product that I want to build, where time tracking is just a small part of. That time I created first draft of Product Roadmap and now I try to follow it. That was mainly been influenced how we work in my current company what tools and process we are using.
It is a spare time project. At the beginning I spent no more that 3-4 hours per week mainly on weekends. But last several month’s when I’ve been approaching release dates I put almost all my free time on that.
Project is already on milestone 2, “Look & Feel Release” and supposed to be public. Nevertheless the time and effort it is still MVP. It’s primary functionality could be described in one sentence: “give you task a name; add new task on dashboard; start timer as you started to work on this task and release timer as you stopped; submit task on server;”. Originally I haven’t planned to go in a public availability with that. It was just a playground for HTML/CSS, MVC 2, jQuery. So, even now it lacks some common site functionality as mail notifications, remember me and so on.
I were inspired by some other small projects that people releasing just for fun. I like that someone working to have own “footprint” in web having a product placed there. I like that way of learning the things not only from books but from practical exercises. I like to have something to care, plan, enhance, develop. I hope that I would be receiving feedbacks that might would make a product better.
It is open source. You can crawl the repository and find something interesting for you. It would be great if you fork it and push some changes. I continue to make it open sources as far as I can do.
Site design have been created by Sasha. She have never tried a web design before this project. We’ve started together with simple tutorials and articles, replicating some existing site designs, learning photoshop. I was happy to see how fast she delivered first results. Even if we usually have completely different vision on things we came to one result. So, during the project we also formed a nice team of developer and designer.
So, as soon as original idea was to learn something new, what have I learned so far? A lot I think:
-
Getting Real - methodology and recommendations by creators of Ruby on Rails, that fits my project perfectly.
-
ASP.net MVC 2 - I’ve got a great introduction to MVC2 with a lot of help of Steven Sanderson great book Pro ASP.NET MVC 2 Framework, Second Edition.
-
JavaScript/jQuery - this one became one of my favorite language and jQuery one of the favorite frameworks.
-
HTML/CSS - I’ve never done so much HTML/CSS before. I would not say I’m good on it, but I definitely improved.
-
UpperCut and Roundhouse - good tools that help you with versioning and deployment.
-
Moq, Automapper, JSon, REST and more :).
What should I do now? I would take one week rest and to refresh my eyes a bit. I would start with a planning next release and next sprints to work on. I hope to back for my normal blogging rhythm again as well as support a product blog. So, I still got something to do :). But today is the birthday of Trackyt.net and on weekend I would be definitely celebrating it!
I’ve not been blogging for awhile, not because I’m too lazy but because I’ve spent all the time for my own first release. And today I’m very happy, proud and excited to announce that Trackyt.net is now available online.
Trackyt.net is a simple time management application. I’ve chosen this idea while I was working on my self-study project, just because it is well known, something I can use for myself. Latter on I started to feel that I see a bigger picture, bigger product that I want to build, where time tracking is just a small part of. That time I created first draft of Product Roadmap and now I try to follow it. That was mainly been influenced how we work in my current company what tools and process we are using.
It is a spare time project. At the beginning I spent no more that 3-4 hours per week mainly on weekends. But last several month’s when I’ve been approaching release dates I put almost all my free time on that.
Project is already on milestone 2, “Look & Feel Release” and supposed to be public. Nevertheless the time and effort it is still MVP. It’s primary functionality could be described in one sentence: “give you task a name; add new task on dashboard; start timer as you started to work on this task and release timer as you stopped; submit task on server;”. Originally I haven’t planned to go in a public availability with that. It was just a playground for HTML/CSS, MVC 2, jQuery. So, even now it lacks some common site functionality as mail notifications, remember me and so on.
I were inspired by some other small projects that people releasing just for fun. I like that someone working to have own “footprint” in web having a product placed there. I like that way of learning the things not only from books but from practical exercises. I like to have something to care, plan, enhance, develop. I hope that I would be receiving feedbacks that might would make a product better.
It is open source. You can crawl the repository and find something interesting for you. It would be great if you fork it and push some changes. I continue to make it open sources as far as I can do.
Site design have been created by Sasha. She have never tried a web design before this project. We’ve started together with simple tutorials and articles, replicating some existing site designs, learning photoshop. I was happy to see how fast she delivered first results. Even if we usually have completely different vision on things we came to one result. So, during the project we also formed a nice team of developer and designer.
So, as soon as original idea was to learn something new, what have I learned so far? A lot I think:
- Getting Real - methodology and recommendations by creators of Ruby on Rails, that fits my project perfectly.
- ASP.net MVC 2 - I’ve got a great introduction to MVC2 with a lot of help of Steven Sanderson great book Pro ASP.NET MVC 2 Framework, Second Edition.
- JavaScript/jQuery - this one became one of my favorite language and jQuery one of the favorite frameworks.
- HTML/CSS - I’ve never done so much HTML/CSS before. I would not say I’m good on it, but I definitely improved.
- UpperCut and Roundhouse - good tools that help you with versioning and deployment.
- Moq, Automapper, JSon, REST and more :).
What should I do now? I would take one week rest and to refresh my eyes a bit. I would start with a planning next release and next sprints to work on. I hope to back for my normal blogging rhythm again as well as support a product blog. So, I still got something to do :). But today is the birthday of Trackyt.net and on weekend I would be definitely celebrating it!