
Show HN: Trackiem – Custom trackers to track anything over any period of time - avinoth
https://www.trackiem.com/
======
avinoth
Bit of a backstory for how Trackiem came to be.

I've always been obsessed about tracking individual pieces of information in
my life and finding patterns for certain activities. Like, activities that
lead up to a headache., correlations between number of coffees I drink and
number of hours I sleep and so on..

I have tried using specific tracker tools before but they always inevitably
becomes not useful as they are targeted towards specific niche or goal (like
habit building, budget planning, etc)., whereas I wanted something generic
that offers just the right tools and lets me build my trackers to the way I
want. Hence, I built Trackiem.

I've built it to be as much un-opinionated as possible, by just offering the
components that makes up a tracker and let users customize it the way they
want.

This is only the initial version which lets you create trackers with basic
"types" and "frequencies" with reminders. I've planned exciting things down
the line for though, such as customized dashboard & reminders, more nuanced
tracker types - this will allow you to build your own finance tracker, time
tracker and so on.

Excited for the launch and any feedback is much appreciated!

~~~
tonystubblebine
As someone who built a habit tracker, I like it. It looks elegant and easy to
use and you seem clear on what you are optimizing for.

A couple of thoughts.

I think it's important to be clear whether you building an app that is
optimized for tracking for insight or for change. That is what explains why I
took a different approach to designing a habit tracker than you are taking. My
primary was for change. Yours sounds like for insight.

The reason to be clear is that it can help you filter out feature requests.

There's only one other example of what you're building that I've seen and
thought was well done. [http://reporter-app.com/](http://reporter-app.com/)

If you are planning to charge, I would want to know that before I sign up for
a free version. "Free until 2021, then $5/month."

~~~
avinoth
Thanks for the suggestion and the associated link.

You're right, the primary motivation was to do tracking for insights but down
the line I would like if this can be agnostic even from that., like one
feature I was planning to do is "Overlay charts" which lets you overlay data
from multiple trackers to figure out patterns. On a different line, I've
visioned if it could sort of have a "Streak" builder with triggers after
certain "value" is achieved, which then allows it to have "goal" based
tracking abilities.

Will do a write-up on the "manifesto" of the product, and will ensure the
intent is clear from the landing page.

As for the pricing, I really haven't decided on one and when to charge. But
rest assured, I've always planned to grandfather users who signed up before
any payment plan is launched. Basically, anything you use for free will
forever be free.

Thanks again.

------
amflare
Seems neat, but some screenshots or a demo account would be nice so I can see
the product before I give away my email.

~~~
melicerte
agree with that. Also, detailling the pricing plan when leaving beta period
would be nice

~~~
avinoth
I've attached some screenshots on the parent's reply, here it is -
[https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3h6xg78lfc402k5/AAAwAYw3Yohsvp84c...](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3h6xg78lfc402k5/AAAwAYw3Yohsvp84cAZW7_d3a?dl=0)

As for the pricing, I really haven't decided on one and when to charge. But
rest assured, I've always planned to grandfather users who signed up before
any payment plan is launched. Basically, anything you use for free when you
signup will forever be free.

------
jciochon
Seems like something I have been looking for. I am currently using a
combination of Daylio and a random counting app I found on iOS to track myself
on some habits, but this looks like a better solution.

Any plans for native mobile apps, or web only?

~~~
avinoth
> Any plans for native mobile apps, or web only?

Definitely! I put off building this for sometime mainly because I wanted to do
it as App first. But since web version had a faster iteration, i got this one
out to start with. I've already did some work on the app front and hopefully
will get it out by this year end.

~~~
kopochameleon
What stack did you go with for this?

~~~
avinoth
Its Rails+Postgres on the backend & Vuejs (TS) on the frontend. Hosting is
done through dokku on a Hetzner VPS cloud.

------
yurishimo
Curious why you made the yes/no separate from the frequency tracker when under
the hood I'm guessing you're storing a boolean anyway? You're likely also
tracking a type already, so you could use 0/1 data and the type to change your
graphs, then people could change the tracker type in the future if necessary.

~~~
avinoth
Under the hood the frequency is also handled as numbers (0/1), there is a way
for users to change the type if desired from Boolean to X Times, but
complications stem when they want to do the other way around.

Some of the main pain points it might introduced are into visualizing the
historical data. When you've been saying yes & No, and suddenly you want to
track count, you'd see bit of inconsistency on how the data is presented. This
proves hinderance to further work on finding the patterns. Hence why..

The way it is structured now, tracker is a one immutable component of type &
frequency and when one of it changes, its a whole new tracker. This would
simplify the experience for the user down the line. Rest assured, if this
seems to be bothering users much, I'm willing to see if it could be done the
other way as well.

------
Jugurtha
Seems useful.

TL;DR on my questions:

\- API

\- Leverage tooling for infrastructure monitoring

\- Clients (Python, or others)

\- CLI

\- Hooks (launch scripts on events)

\- Events abstraction to connect different systems (cloudevents.io)

\- Groups

Have you thought of treating it like events in production and leveraging
monitoring tools for humans? For example, we do work with events to monitor
infrastructure and trigger actions, but that is what many of us do for a
living, and not usable by most people.

You can have a "Human Reliability Engineering". If you bring the tooling to
monitor infrastructure to regular folks, that could be something. Because then
you can leverage tools with common abstractions and language (metrics, events,
etc.) You can then leverage Grafana, Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and all the
tools that do that very well for infrastructure.

Speaking of abstractions, have you checked cloudevents.io[1]? You can then
open yourself to various protocols and destinations that understand these
events, and people could build applications _on top_ of your service.

Also, have you thought of opening the API and adding a client or CLI so people
can control it without opening the mobile app?

For example, as a user, I could generate API keys from your site and then use
these keys in a client (Go, Python, whatnot) to pretty much do anything I
could do with the application, get data, push data.

Also, have you thought about adding hooks so I can write a program that says:
whenever I add an event, run scripts in certain directories. Similar to Git
hooks.

The script is executed with the event as an argument, and does whatever I want
it to do. It can be as silly as the following:

I add an event of drinking a cup of coffee. There's a script that gets that
event, and decrements a counter somewhere of coffee capsules, and if the
coffee capsules are under a certain threshold, trigger an alert or something.

If there are groups, I can have a hook that alerts several people in a group
that we're out of coffee.

This may be useful for people recovering from an addiction, for example. A
group trying to quit a certain substance. Every time a member of the group
consumes said substance, it triggers an event.

They could monitor themselves, but they may also monitor each other and see
that member A is doing fine, but member B is starting to drink more and more
this week. What's going on? Let's check up on them, talk with them, support
them as they may be going through a rough one.

Someone more experimented could see _patterns_ of events. Substance
consumption, missing workouts, increased spending, etc. Is there
disengagement?

Once you generate that data in a standardized way that can be leveraged by
mature tools, people can build things on top of it and you can get many ideas
and use cases.

[1]: [https://cloudevents.io](https://cloudevents.io)

