Shipping in March: Week 1

I promised a progress update on how my attempt to get 4 projects shipped this month was going. On my first week, I decided to focus on my time tracking tool, hourglass. I’ve had this in the works for sometime and unfortunately, it’s fallen by the wayside to client work.

I’ve failed on my first week in getting this released to the world, but I’m far happier with how it’s working now and the value it might give to any potential user than previously. I’d had a working app and a shiny new design for it prior to last week, so first on my agenda was to bring that in and start from there. Beyond that, I bug fixed a number of known issues, followed by building out a number of reporting features which I feel are critical to have before release. It’s also allowed me to better think about the decisions I’ve made regarding implementation and whether or not it makes sense to change them at any stage soon.

Unfortunately, over this time I hit a major hurdle of my internet connection being killed due to scheduled maintenance. I had been sent a letter on this, but hadn’t clocked the date. I was lucky that in Cardiff we have a number of excellent co-working facilities that allow me to turn up unannounced and fled home for the sanctuary of Foundershub. In the end I lost probably a couple of hours to this problem and I’m glad I made the decision early on to move before I’d lost the best part of the day.

I’m going to be moving on to my next project this week as planned and move back to hourglass if time allows. I feel that experiencing the variety of these projects will hopefully allow me to continue some kind of momentum. Out of all the ones I have planned, I feel that hourglass is probably one of the larger ones too.