8Work

8Work.co Building from Scratch

2021

Website

8work.co

Building from Scratch

These days in a new-normal era, we start developing an online environment in almost everything we do. Including working remotely, anywhere we want. Yet working remotely needs technical support and a time-tracking software is essential for remote workers. 8work is a real-time tracking software with an automated screenshot feature. It will help project managers, freelancers, graphic designers, copywriters, and other remote workers to track their time and monitor every project. There are some other features that we’ve built from scratch.

Solution

How We Develop It
Basically, all Limecommerce members are remote workers. We need time-tracker software, but some of them are expensive. So, why don’t make it for ourselves? We did research about current trends, how people work at home, how they manage projects, and how to check if people are working at home or not. After several months working on it, now we proudly present our new software, 8work, from the best Limecommerce’s developers. Since our first development, there are several features provided by 8work: 1. Dashboard It has a dashboard that shows you Online Time, Most Active Project, and you can monitor all working progress in a single page. If you want to check a specific manager or staff, just click report and it will direct you to the report page. 2. Profile Setting Set up your name, email, address, password and timezone in your profile page. You can add a profile picture as well. This is where you can upgrade your paid plan and get the maximum benefit from 8work. (Spoiler, it’s only $4/month) 3. Time tracker and Screenshot

We successfully completed the development of 8work’s desktop application. Now you can download it and start using the trial version of 8work. You can configure how much screenshot that 8work needs to take every hour. The desktop app also has configuration to automatically open every time you start your PC and show notifications of the taken screenshots. 4. Project Management Add, edit, and delete every project that you have. It’s all in one place. 5. Employee and User Roles 8work has a particular page for managing your employee. You can set user roles for every employee. There are three user roles on 8work:

Administrator: You can literally do anything if you are an administrator on 8work

Manager: Below admin and built to manage staff below them, but it can’t be used for editing other staff. Only the administrator can do that.

Staff: Every staff can track their time by choosing the project, add a note about it (if necessary), and click the “Play” button to start the tracker.

Monitoring Screenshot and Offline Time All user roles can monitor their own screenshots. You can also add Offline Time in case you make an offline meeting with a client or have an offline job that couldn’t be tracked by 8work.

There is an option to blur your screenshot. It has a manual button on the top right corner of the screenshot. 8work also allows you to run auto-blur screenshot for a specific staff. Just in case you want to keep your employee’s privacy or there is a company secret that you should hide. 7. Report Generator You can generate a filtered report. The report can be filtered by employee, project you work on, and time range. It will also show you the time graphic and screenshot.

You can save and share the report to your clients. Relax, your clients don’t need to sign up to 8work, you just need to share the link and they can open it online.

Challenges and Solutions

Creating a client side app is a different kind of challenge. Being used to server side development ourselves. We cannot control the environment around the app, that is the user OS. We have an early user of the app around 40 of them using 8work daily (including our own team!), and we encountered so many issues that is frankly quite hard to find. The solutions that we do are the following:
1. Write unit tests. The unit tests found basic issues that might happen with the application.
2. Automatic deployment of desktop app Automatic deployment reduces the human error when deploying the app. Our app is written in Electron which compiles directly into Windows, Mac, and Linux.
3. Direct user feedback
4. Ability for users to upload logs whenever there’s an error.