Video interview with the Freckle team

Jan 30, 2009 by Dan Taylor    6 Comments    Posted under: Productivity, Technology

A few weeks back, my production partner Magda Pressel and I had the opportunity to sit down with Amy Hoy, Thomas Fuchs, Dieter Komendera, and Joe Markovics, a.k.a the team behind the time tracking solution, Freckle.

Watch the full HD version of freckle: time tracking rethought from Dan Taylor on Vimeo.

MP: This is the team of Lets Freckle, a cooperative effort between Slash7 featuring Amy Hoy, and naturally Thomas Fuchs and abloom featuring Dieter Komendera and Joe Markovics.  Amy and Thomas are well known and respected figures in the programming world, noteably for Thomas’ involvement in the development of Ruby on Rails.

MP: We’re here with the team of letsfreckle.com and I’m going to ask them some questions. So maybe just tell me something about yourself.

AH: My name is Amy Hoy, I’m the public voice, I write all the blog posts so far.  I’m an interaction designer, self taught, and I’ve been making web pages in various forms since 1994.

TF: My name is Thomas Fuchs and I’m more on the development side of things.  I’ve done web development since about the same time as Amy did. So, like fourteen years now.  Amy reminds me that I’m the author of script.aculo.us which is used by sites like Apple, NASA, (AH) CNN, yeah, sites like that.

MP: Joe and Dieter share a similar past, both working in web development for the past 9 years.

JM: I started during college, together with him.  We were at a kind of boarding school and we were bored all day.  That’s how we got into web dev, and that’s what we’re still doing right now.

DK: My name is Dieter Komendera, and I am more on the programming side of things.  I’m doing all the…most of the Rails stuff.

MP: All four members work as freelancers, and have spent a lot of their time trying to find a time tracking solution that was right for them; but often came up short.

AH: The idea came from looking at what other systems did not have that frustrated me.  The first thing that I did when I was really hungover and working Freckle out on paper was to look at all the assumptions that the other software makes that you have to do first and see which we can get rid of.

MP: Indeed the software is well structured and user friendly.  For example job codes can be created on the fly, and simply tagged.  However, Freckle still is a work in progress.  Customer feedback is quite important to the freckle team, but can sometimes go a little overboard.

TF: There were a couple of quite outrageous comments.  It’s very interesting to see people who are getting that enraged about a piece of software.

MP: But while a number of time tracking solutions on the market today offer a host of additional features that Freckle does not, that’s not to say that the team isn’t hard at work building out additional functionality, including an API.

DK: We definitely have plans to integrate invoicing to freckle so that you can just run a report on the time entries you have and it will generate an invoice for you.

MP: Freckle’s API is designed to both import and export time tracking data from a variety of sources.  With the Freckle API, developers can both push and pull data to and from Freckle.

DK: This of course can be used from any other application who wants to use Freckle or to integrate with Freckle.

MP: Like many small web application companies today, Freckle is 100 percent privately funded.

AH: We’re not funded in any way.  We have very low costs, so we’ve been funding it, quote/unquote, with our time.

MP: Freckle; four freelancers that couldn’t find a time tracking solution that fit their needs simply built their own solution from the ground up.  And in the process, they’ve successfully managed to create a new way of looking at time tracking.

Related articles

• Freckle: Time tracking with style (ajaxian.com)