Could I get some tips on how to use beeminder more effectively to aid me in my development work. Only way I know of using trello is tracking cards that have moved to a certain list.
I use bitbucket for source control and thought of just tracking commits.
So I am looking for additional stuff like these two examples that will help me as a developer to be more effective and productive. What has worked for you guys\gals with your development environments?
Great question! Let me start a list and turn it into a wiki…
I do use rescuetime to track overall spent coding and that has worked really well for me.
How do you track UVI’s? I like the fact that you are tracking visual improvements. Have you found a way to automate this?
I have a text file that I update with the details of each UVI. There is an automated process[1] which then uses that to update the beeminder goal.
Unfortunately there is no magic which will update the text file with the details of a UVI, but it’s useful reference to have anyway, as the beeminder goal keeps you focused on delivering UVI’s and you then have an easy record of things to be able to paste into status reports/invoices etc.
[1] I don’t remember if it’s a git-commit hook or a cron job.
Thanks for adding UVIs to the list! That’s the most powerful of all in our opinion. We actually don’t automate it all. We give each tweet a lot of thought and then also manually update beeminder.com/meta/uvi (we describe the UVIs more tersely in the comments there, but if it weren’t for the long-established habit of doing that we’d at least have the tweets auto-generate the datapoints on Beeminder.
And just to reemphasize the power of beeminding UVIs, it is abundantly clear that Beeminder would have died without beeminding this. For over 4 years now (from before public launch) we’ve averaged 1 UVI per day. We have $1000 at stake and have actually coughed it up once, soon after hitting 1000 UVIs, and it was easily worth it.
I already have my rescuetime goal which I will keep going but I just decided to add a 90 day uvi goal. Hopefully this will speed up my time to launch. I have not automated this goal so I will manually keep track of changes made in spreadsheet.
I see you have one for code coverage. How did that work out?
I had an “open issues” goal, tracking the number of open issues in a JIRA project. That didn’t work well because not all issues take the same time and the overall judgement i made for the time spent was not good and I ended up getting anxious about it.
I’m now mainly on a goal of (Rescue)Time spent, filtered on the “Software Development” category of RT, and it’s going better. My thinking is now “put in the time, the issues will eventually go away” 
All in all, it’s what motivates you the most. Try, review and adapt.
Ive got a couple goals that help but I thought I would probe the community for more solutions that I could benefit from.
a UVI goal sounds good, in the sense of “release something every day”, e.g. do something concrete and useful (you can get carried away and spend time coding on useless/meaningless stuff too)