A Personal Productivity Engine: Developing a User Activity Tracker and a To-Do Management App

As a seasoned software engineer, having real-world experiences often inspires my pet projects. Today, I will share my present endeavors in the realms of both user activity tracking and a to-do management application.

User Activity Tracking: An Essential Tool for Web and SaaS Apps

During my tenure as a developer, working on several SaaS applications, I consistently encountered a critical issue: the lack of granular visibility into user behavior. This led me to undertake a challenge of building a platform dedicated to tracking, analyzing, and reacting to user activity within web and SaaS applications.

The platform's architecture is designed to excel in scalability. It needs to scale horizontally and vertically to handle the vast influx of user data from hundreds of websites, potentially generating millions of events per day. Losing events is not an option as this would result in gaping holes in the data, compromising the analysis and insights generated.

Key Considerations and Features

Unlike Google Analytics, our platform emphasizes identifiable users. Each user’s ID is transmitted along with the event data, allowing us to follow every user interaction or analyze segments of users to discover common behaviors and insights. For instance, we can track what the most common behaviors are for trial users who become long-term customers within the first week. Additionally, we aim to assist in identifying user experience issues like how certain users might encounter browser errors on specific pages or how users might give up on engaging with a full-screen popup after multiple failed attempts to close it.

A Productivity App for the Universal Windows Platform: ‘Keep Up’

In addition to my work on the user activity tracking platform, I am currently dedicated to developing a productivity application tailored for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). This application, named Keep Up, is a Windows Store application designed for Windows 10 devices, providing a platform for managing tasks and notes. As a senior student, this project aligns perfectly with my academic and professional goals, aiming to develop a practical application that helps individuals manage their daily tasks and notes efficiently.

Features and Progress

The to-do management aspect of Keep Up is structured around a user-friendly interface for adding, managing, and completing to-dos. Additionally, the app includes a sticky notes feature, allowing users to jot down quick thoughts or reminders. The app is currently 85% complete and is set to hit the Windows Store by September 15th, furthering its name with a sleek and user-friendly design.

Final Thoughts on Pet Projects

Whether it's a user activity tracking platform aimed at providing comprehensive insights or a productivity app designed to help individuals manage their daily tasks, my pet projects are driven by the desire to solve real-world problems and contribute to the digital ecosystem. By leveraging my experience as a software engineer, I aim to create tools that not only serve my needs but also those of my users, ensuring that every piece of code I write is optimized for performance, scalability, and user satisfaction.

Keywords: user activity tracking, productivity app, to-do management