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Show HN: Perfect time tracking for developers right in your IDE

getkoala.co

8 pointsmartijndeh10 comments

Personally, I'd love to see this working without having to send data to the Koala servers. My job has some strict policies on what data can be send to third party servers and I'm not sure how this relates to project/client names/details. I imagine others are in the same boat.

I believe it would be relatively simple to calculate time locally and then display the totals in some custom Atom buffers.

Dev here.

You can actually configure a .koala file in the root of your project to define what to send to Koala.

Nevertheless, I see your point. I'm thinking of going open source and releasing a community edition so you can set-up a hosted version. Would that be interesting for you?

Thanks for the response!

Sweet, I didn't realise that. A self-hosted version would be cool. For my own projects I don't mind sending data, just for corporate work its more difficult. Having something I could run on my own machine and periodically get reports from without having to manually enter time constantly would be really handy.

No problem, thanks for checking Koala out. :)

I'll send you a ping once the self-hosted version is available. In the mean time feel free to send any feedback to martijn@getkoala.co. :)

> We invented a /new/ time tracking system..

Having had a very quick browse on the page. This looks like wakatime.com.

I've been using that one for a couple of months with zero problems, it gives me an very detailed overview of what I worked on (down to filename, h:m:s editing, git branch name etc) and it gives me daily and weekly summaries.

Is there a reason for me to change to koala?

Yes, this is true. I only discovered wakatime a few days ago. The major difference at the moment is wakatime's free plan only includes 1 week of data retention, whereas Koala's plan includes indefinite data retention.

I see. So how are you monetising? I've considered becoming a subscriber to wakatime purely to help them keep it running. I've just never needed to have my exact data from a long time ago, their daily/weekly summaries is good enough.

The focus now is on increasing the retention of a small user base. I first want to make sure things work super easy and the added value is clear. For example, in our Atom plugin, you can just sign in and it's all set up. You don't need to copy any access token manually.

Monetization will happen when we start focussing on teams, managers and invoicing.

Which editor do you use btw? Please try Koala for a week as I'm eager to receive feedback. Which editor do you use btw?

Some website quirks I noticed:

- When I go to pledge/api docs I see previously hidden navbar links 'events', 'reports'

- If I enter the 'events' section, it asks me to sign in and the browser history back action stops working.

I'm really impressed by the pledge you're making there, it's a very amicable touch.

Thanks for reporting the quirks. Too bad I missed them.

Regarding the pledge: it's actually something I've been seeing at more startups. I can't recall which one but I should put up a link to them.

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