Time Cockpit Blog - Rainer Stropek

It is sometimes hard to keep track of your work during a busy week, isn't it? In such situations, our users love time cockpit's signal trackers. They make notes about your work in the background. When it comes to completing your time sheet records, the data they collected makes sure you do not forget billable hours. This month, we added signal tracker data to time cockpit's HTML5 client. In this blog post your get all the information you need to benefit from your signals when accessing time cockpit through a browser.  Read more ...

Besides working on our flagship product time cockpit, we help customers to build their own cloud-based SaaS solutions. Looking back on the work I have been doing for the last few years, it strikes me how much my work as a developer has changed since we made the move to cloud and PaaS. One question has become determining: Is there a PaaS service for my problem? In this blog post I share how we evaluate PaaS services used in our projects.  Read more ...

Machine learning is a hot topic nowadays. Therefore, the R programming language has gained a lot of popularity lately. Microsoft is also pushing in that direction by adding R support in many of its products including Visual Studio. I assume that some customers want to analyze data from time cockpit in R, too. So I wrote this blog post to demonstrate how you can use time cockpit's RESTful Web API and TCQL to get data into R for further analysis.   Read more ...

Time cockpit has been using OpenID Connect based on IdentityServer for quite a while. Until recently, all our own clients and clients that our customers wrote used the implicit flow. A few weeks ago, a customer approached us who wanted to use hybrid flow. This month, we made the necessary changes to time cockpit to support this authentication scenario.  Read more ...

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about how to keep up with ever-changing technology. One of my tips was starting side projects to dive deeper into new technologies. I have been doing side projects myself for a long time. They can be informative and fun. However, they can turn into nightmares for you and your team if chosen poorly. In this blog post I would like to summarize tips for getting the most out of your side projects.  Read more ...

We have built time cockpit so that you can tailor it to your specific needs. The full client has had an Impersonation-feature since the early days of time cockpit. This month, we added support for impersonation to the HTML5 client, too. Read more about testing with impersonation in this article  Read more ...

We had a busy month because we added some quite large features to time cockpit. Active/passive travel time is now in production, we added a German UI to the HTML5 client, we reworked the reporting engine and much more. We hope you like the progress we made with time cockpit. In this article you can read more about all of this month's enhancements.  Read more ...

I have been doing consulting and software development work for more than twenty years. Additionally, I speak about financial aspects of project management with lots of teams through the work we do with our flagship product time cockpit. Based on that experience I want to share some tips that can helped me to reduce discussions over invoices and billable hours.  Read more ...

Public speaking, technology and cloud consulting, training, software architecture workshops, etc. are an important part of my business beside working on our products, foremost time cockpit. When doing such projects, I see many teams struggle with platform selection. Should we build a web app or a native app? Is .NET the right platform for developing our backend or should we move to Node.js? Should we integrate/buy a standard product for dashboards or build our own component? Dicisions for questions like these can have massive consequences. They can make difference between long-term success and failure of projects. In this blog article I like to share our current thinking in this regards concerning our own products.  Read more ...

Ever heard about "pronation" or "supination"? If you have, you are probably a runner like myself. Over years, running shoe manufacturers have been emphasizing how important it is to analyze pronation of your foot and choose a proper shoe based on it - until studies showed that your shoe's pronation control is not connected to injury rates at all. "Pronation" was the running shoe industry's sacred cow. Do you have such "sacred cows" in your business, too? My advice: Never stop questioning them!  Read more ...