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Show HN: Adadot – analytics for better, happier developers (adadot.com)
325 points by Adadot 1412 days ago
We are Jason and Alex and are very excited to be launching Adadot https://adadot.com/ in this community. We have spent 15+ years in remote tech teams in unicorns, start-ups and scaleups.

Developers are increasingly under pressure to be more productive and ship faster. However, its difficult to improve what you cannot see or measure.

My role (Alex) was in operations and I was collaborating with Sales, Finance and other teams. All these teams had systems like Salesforce and SAP that helped them quantify what “good looks like”.

Meanwhile engineering (Jason’s background), was flying blind and spending up to two hours a day patching data together for their sprint meetings.

Some of the challenges that we faced in trying to solve this for ourselves were that:

Most of the data a developer can use for insight is fragmented and spread across multiple tools like Gitlab / Github / Jira / Slack / Calendar Most of the insight is organised around tasks / projects. While this type of information is helpful to an extent, at the end of the day were people managing people Typical developer metrics were one-dimensional. Developers who were great collaborators always seemed to score lower on classic productivity metrics but they add true value

Our goal is to help developers improve the way they work, collaborate, and feel through data.

Software in this space has traditionally focused on monitoring developers and their performance for the benefit of their manager. We took a different approach.

Adadot is developer-centric meaning that we focus on empowering each developer to improve their own working patterns with data that only admins in their company would have been previously able to access. Team managers can see aggregated data only. Any individual developer can sign up and use Adadot without having to be part of a team licence.

More importantly, the work of a developer is not just code and its our core belief that the current definitions around productivity are limited. Burnout is a very real problem. Great collaborators and people who lift their teams up are underserved by code-focused engineering productivity tools.

Right as we started building Adadot Github's SPACE https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3454124 productivity came about scientifically validating our thinking!

Finally, we figured that no developer on the planet wants to manually enter data. So we found a way to collect and process data automatically through integrations.

For now the output is dashboards and benchmarks centered around three core data themes:

Work: Classic data-driven engineering metrics, like deployment speed and failure rate. Identify blockers in real time

Collaboration: Understanding if the work is happening in silos, if the team are helping each other (eg. with code reviews, participating in Support channel) and if messages and meetings are becoming a distraction

Wellbeing: Helping you to uncover unhealthy working patterns and protect yourself and your team from burnout. Is there enough Focus time for deep code work and when? Surfacing upskilling and new languages that are being used

What this is not: A monitoring tool that will tell you (or your manager) who in your team has been lazy.

Results: We are seeing teams improve velocity by up to 50% within the first 30 days. 70% also maintain the rate of improvement for at least 3 months meaning that they are able to increase their productivity sustainably.

Individual developers are using it to improve their collaboration visibility and gain promotions to managerial positions.

Check out:

Our demo: https://share.vidyard.com/watch/XEctQFzdQpMgpnjY4giFNV

Public Roadmap: https://adadot.prodcamp.com/

Knowledge base: https://adadothelp.document360.io/

Our Ask: If you are a developer - we would love for you to try Adadot and give us your feedback. We have a free plan and also offer free trials at https://adadot.com/

9 comments

Hello HN, I am Orfeas, the Technical Lead of Adadot. Just to add to what the rest of the team has already mentioned, we've tried to create a tool that can help ourselves and others track and better manage our working habits to avoid burning out and reinforcing patterns that keeps us productive while also keeping us mentally healthy. This is especially important today, where we're seeing a rapidly changing working environment with the increase in the adoption of work from home and flexible work schemas and the changes that come along with them.

Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts in the comments below, and please don't hesitate to ask me and the rest of the team any questions you might have!

People like Orfeas make Adadot what it is <3
Sounds exactly like the panopticon surveillance feature of Teams that Microsoft got rightfully roasted for a few months ago, only laser-targeted at developers (or their keepers) instead.

> What this is not: A monitoring tool that will tell you (or your manager) who in your team has been lazy.

At least, not until the enterprise money shows up.

Hi Paledot, Adadot only shows aggregate data at the team level so no one can single out a developer. Teams have a minimum number of 3 participants.

On the other hand, each developer is given access to data that previously only the admin in his company would see. We have plenty of examples of developers using that data to advocate for themselves for better working conditions or promotions.

Just for clarity, the data that Adadot shows already belongs to the company so if you work for a place that wants to monitor you and treat you unfairly they have plenty of opportunity to do so without spending money on us.

There are also much better tools for monitoring than Adadot which they can use.

We have made a very conscious decision to do things this way eventhough in some cases it might cost us customers. Hope this helps.

Hi, I am Jason, the CTO and co-founder of Adadot.

Throughout the years, I have watched myself, my colleagues and friends struggle to understand how to go faster without burning out in both startups and unicorn companies.

I wanted to build something that helps the broader community and I am very happy to be sharing this with you today!

Super excited to hear your thoughts about it!!

Great to have you here J!
Hello everyone!

I am George, one of the developers of the team! One of the main reasons I started programming was to provide to the community and Adadot really does that. Our sole purpose is to support the developers in order to reach their peak without risking a mental burnout.

Your feedback is valuable for us, so feel free to contact any of us

Hi guys I am one of the makers! I love creating tech that helps people in their everyday life. If you dig the UX / front end, or if you have any feedback please leave a comment. We would love to hear from you!
Looking forward to hearing what people think!
This looks like an essential tool to have on your side for working. I will for sure recommend it to dev around me. Well done Alex and Jason!
How did this hit the front page? Your comment is word for word the same as "Leclerc1", and every other comment is by someone identifying themselves as associated with the company.
This looks like an essential tool to have on your side for working. I will for sure recommend it to dev around me. Well done Alex and Jason!
Thank you so much for your kind comment, very happy you like Adadot!
Wtf astro turfing in this thread.. I guess its normal for HN..?
Congrats on the launch!

I've shared with our CTO - he really liked your public roadmap :)

That's very kind of you! We have enabled voting so he can request on his / her favourite features and we constantly add new ideas!