Time Cockpit Blog - Rainer Stropek

The calm summer months are the perfect time to work on some long intended, internal projects. This month, we finally found the time to fully automate our web deployment using VSTS Release Management. In this blog post we share our release process and its technical implementation using VSTS and Azure.  Read more ...

Recently, I spoke with one of our partners about their view on remote working vs. colocation. My discussion partner was convinced that his software development team is more productive because more or less all members work in the same location. That conversation gave me a lot of food for thought. Do efficiency gains from colocation outweigh losing talents who are not able or not willing to regularly commute into the office? Is there a happy medium? In this blog post I share my thoughts on this topic.  Read more ...

This month we launch our brand new time cockpit documentation portal. The existing one has served us well for many years but it was time for a change. The technology behind time cockpit's documentation portal has been revamped from scratch. The new system is convenient to use. Additionally, it greatly simplifies our process of writing documentation which will lead to more up-to-date information. In this blog post we highlight the most important features of our new portal.  Read more ...

Whenever we start new SaaS projects, we try not to start with a too technical focus. We believe that the technical implementation has to reflect the business goals. Just focusing on technological aspects raises the danger of a project failure because of over-engineering or over-simplification. In this blog post we share important business-related questions that we use to prepare software architecture workshops for SaaS projects.  Read more ...

Our monthly release cycle has been in place for years. With more and more customers switching from time cockpit's full client to HTML5, we think its time for a change. Read more about our future update strategy and the different time cockpit environments you can choose from.  Read more ...

Although we love to write code, we often have to write text content, too. I am thinking of blog posts, documentation, meeting minutes, presentations, etc. Lately, we started to use Markdown for more and more of these purposes. Our latest project in that direction is moving our product documentation from Sandcastle (MAML = XML) to DocFX (=Markdown).  Read more ...

Time tracking has a bad reputation. Nobody likes to account for how exactly she is spending her working time. Developers want to code instead of struggling with administrative tasks like filling out their time sheet. In my opinion, this attitude is wrong. Granted, we build software for time tracking so the topic is naturally near to my heart. Independently, I really believe that a good time tracking practice can solve a big problem for many developers: It can help getting rid of hated technical debts.  Read more ...

Extensibility is an important feature of time cockpit. In contrast to many of our competitors, we enable you to tailor time cockpit exactly to your needs. In this blog post, I want to focus on how you can add advanced custom logic using Python scripting. Python scripts are just text, so you can theoretically develop them in any text editor. However, when logic gets more complex, you need a more advanced development environment supporting syntax coloring, IntelliSense, debugging, unit testing, etc. Microsoft offers such an environment: Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS). It is free and it works with Microsoft’s free Visual Studio Community Edition. So, let us see how you can use PTVS to professionalize you Python scripting in time cockpit.  Read more ...

I travel a lot in my job. Last year I had over 70 flight segments, made dozens of long-distance train trips and slept on average once per week in a hotel. In this blog post, I want to share my tips for making good use of travel time. Sometimes I use it for working, sometimes I just relax, but I always try to not waste the time.  Read more ...

More and more of our customers use multiple SaaS solutions to do their business. Many business processes span multiple applications. Therefore, they need a glue that combines the different systems. One possibility is writing serverless functions. However, sometimes graphical workflows are a better match. Azure Logic Apps implement such an approach. In this blog post we demonstrate how you can embed time cockpit in such workflows.  Read more ...