Glorious Metrics

So my introduction to Django is complete and I have my very own (I can't believe no one has built one of these yet?) metrics tracking web-app. So I thought I would brag about it a little bit! The basic idea is, we have a ton of little bits of information that if we were to actively collect over time, or invest in going back through periodically we would be able to see things like lines-of-code increases, who is, and isn't sending daily updates, our runway dollars, number of check-ins, etc. most of it is probably pretty benign, but everything tracked gets better (assuming you're not a terrible manager - or obsessed with improving the metrics), and without visibility how do you improve anything? The tool is architected as a metrics & measurements (a metric is an aggregate, measurements are either deltas or absolutes at a fixed time), repositories (for automated collection), helper fetch & push logs (history and debugging), and email support (weekly summaries). its a little ugly and eventually someone will have to clean it up, but whenever that happens - id like to add event tracking (basically a measurement, but the value is a tag line) and charting for events and metrics. if this ever happens I would love to see the tool get released open-source; just so anyone savy enough to know they should keep an eye on this stuff, but lazy enough to not build their own tool can benefit from my couple days hacking. in other news tonight i have been graciously invited to go and hangout with some toronto vcs and a small mob of startup founders downtown. I'm really excited (and nervous) to go and shake hands, do the pesudo pitch thing, and meet so other smart people in the toronto startup community. gonna be neat!