So instead we got ourselves on the hook on the Skritter forum in a more beemindery way. Here’s the important part:
We got slightly telephone-gamed on the “promised by end of January” thing BUT you are totally right that, come on, we’re Beeminder! So we have the next best thing:
I hereby promise that we’ll launch official Skritter integration before anything else except ones we’ve already started on (Epson/Seiko, Garmin, IFTTT, and Misfit – all of which we hope we can do in January, but now that it’s January 10 we’re noticing that’s not realistic).
AND I hereby promise that Bethany (our CTO) will spend 20 hours/week on the pending integrations (including Skritter) until they’re all launched. Here’s her Beeminder graph to prove it: autod – b – beeminder
But wait there’s more! Every derailment she coughs up on we’ll pay out to you. Yes, you. We’ll figure out the details the first time it happens but the pledge schedule is $5, $10, $30, $90, $270, $810.
Damn it, if Beeminder integrates with Skritter then I’ll have to start learning Chinese.
Sidenote, I’m a big vote for MyFitnessPal calorie integration.
I’d also be interested in Sunsprite integration and while I have no idea how it would work, I’m currently pondering integration with the Basis Peak and it’s galvanic skin response tracking.
An integration with IFTTT will be so fucking awesome. So many things already have “send email to beeminder bot” that it makes no sense not to have an official way to work with it.
I’d like to add my personal “thumbs up” to the idea of having MyNetDiary on your list. For those who haven’t used it, it’s somewhat similar to MyFitnessPal (another very good nutrition/fitness tracking app) but I personally like MyNetDiary a bit better, mostly because it seems quicker and easier to enter food info after I eat. Functionally, the two have a rather similar feature set on paper, but a good UI can make the difference between food logging being simple (which makes me more likely to do it right away) versus a bit tedious (which makes me more likely to say “oh, I’ll do it later when I have time” which then never happens). Thanks for adding it to your list!
A vote for Gleeo Time Tracker. It’s a modetely popular Android time tracker app at 100-500k downloads and rating of 4.7 stars on average. It’s strikes a really good balance between featureset and simplicity. Interface is really well thought out too. Would be perfect for Beeminder
I see the first derail has occurred! Have you worked out those payment details?
I also wanted to make a note that I’m really interested in having the Beeminder IFTTT integration go both ways. I’m actually more excited about having things happen when I add data to my goals rather than having things add data to my goals. I think I’m more motivated to log things in Beeminder because I’ll get charged if I don’t but I still want those things recorded in other places. IFTTT would make that nice and easy.
If you supported tags in the data comments then umbrella goals like productive time could feed subdata into subgoals. So I log all my time in the productive time goal with comments tagged with the subcategory. “If I add data tagged with #project1 to Beeminder goal ‘productive time’ then update Beeminder goal ‘project 1’”
We have! We actually paid the first $5 twice, once to the first person to reply to my beemail about it and once to the person who dibs’d it on the Skritter forum. (I felt bad about not having nailed down the rules so I just paid it double. From now on it’s the first one to call us out!)
Great point about IFTTT triggers as well as actions. Did you know you can do this now with our webhook/callback feature (nerdery required)? As far as I know, @philip is the only one currently hardcore enough to have Beeminder goals automatically feeding other Beeminder goals. You’re right that IFTTT triggers+actions would open up such hardcore-itude to the masses! Really glad you mentioned this!
How? I’m currently doing this by having the API enter the point in all of the relevant goals on entry, but if there is a post-api, more Beemindery way to do this, I’d love to know it. Have had layered goals for a long time and this would make them easier to manage would be great.
Ah, yes, @chipmanaged gets special mention here even if it doesn’t technically count as automatically populating one Beeminder goal from another. (Or does it? I’d like to know about the details!)
But as @philip’s pointing out (by pointing to that other thread), I have in mind using Beeminder’s webhook/callback feature to trigger a program of your own when data is added to a Beeminder goal, and then that program in turn adds data automatically to another Beeminder goal.
Actually, it sounds like @chipmanaged’s system is even more sophisticated and doesn’t need Beeminder’s callback feature simply because she has her own custom interface for entering data.
In any case, @chipmanaged and @philip are both harder core beeminders than me!
there’s $40 of unclaimed derailments on my autod goal… I’m up to $90 pledged now, with two unclaimed derails.
If you were paying close attention to this road (which apparently you’re not, see (1) :-P) you’d notice that I’ve got a section of shallower road coming up. That’s because I’m going on a trip and I’ve dialed my meta road down by half, and consequently my autod road as well. I figure this is legit since I’m fairly sure what I originally agreed to with Danny was: “I’ll spend half of my time on auto data stuff.”
Danny and I had some small bit of debate about whether I ought to count time spent maintaining existing integrations toward this goal. I’m certain that I want to know how much total time is spent on autodata code, including maintaining existing ones, so I definitely do want to track that time, but I guess it’s still an open question whether it should count toward this commitment. What do you think?
Time spent maintaining existing integrations does not make progress toward new integrations so I would not count it as part of this goal.
However I’m not sure it’s fair that the list of new integrations keeps growing, so dialling down the new integration time after you’ve finished the initial 25(?) seems allowable.
Measuring total time spent on integrations is probably a job for tagtime and need not necessarily be minded.
Time spent making sure that integrations actually work totally counts. q.v. our commitment to not putting ourselves on the hook for any big features. Beemindees have a high utility for a stable working service, particularly (I suspect) when it comes to the dark and mysterious edges of integrating with other data sources.
The alternative seems to be a slippery slope of new-for-new’s-sake, quality agnosticism, and inefficient work practices (because we’re counting time, not outcomes). Not that any of those seem likely, but this commitment may as well get the benefit of, say, time spent streamlining and refactoring autod, seeing as it’s impacted by the malefit (from the perspective of wanting-to-take more time) of smoother future integrations.
Bottom line: I think we’ll churn through the wish-list faster if we include everything auto-data-related in this goal.
PS: “half of my time” sounds perfectly reasonable. Let this example of related road changes be a spur to getting Beeminder-as-autod-source on the wish-list.
Since you’re all too polite to yell dibs on Bee’s money we’ll take @insti as having done so, being the first to reply and obviously up to speed on this whole thread. [And done, $40 on the way to @insti.]
I’m not sure how I feel about this “20 hours/week actually meant half whatever my total time is” thing. I mean, yes, I’m sure Bee’s correct, but we already claimed one telephone game exemption and this time the telephone game problem was entirely our fault.
On the other hand, I know there was a bunch of time on old autodata bugfixes and maintenance that Bee didn’t count initially so maybe it’s all working out fairly. In any case the spirit of the commitment seems intact.
PS: The bmndr.com/b/autod commitment is just for Garmin, IFTTT, Misfit, and Skritter (and Epson, now launched). We’ll keep forging ahead after that too but may reassess the steepness of the yellow brick road or put more focus on making it easier for third parties to contribute integrations.
Hey Dan! While I would much rather have the Skritter integration…as a trade off I would love to claim your money (@joeymac1981 on Beeminder and @马洲屹 on Skritter). Here is hoping that the $90 acts as a sufficient motivation …Good luck!/加油!
(: To be clear, it’s the first person to notice after we derail. $5, $10, and $30 have been paid and we’re skating the edge (bmndr.com/b/autod) on the $90!
We’ll figure out the details the first time it happens but the pledge schedule is $5, $10, $30, $90, $270, $810.
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