Building Mortimer

The backdrop

Back 2-3 years before the COVID-19 pandemic one of our customers approached us with a task: can you build us a small system affording us to keep track of the time spent on work by our employees?

We nodded – and that was really the start of Mortimer. It was a bespoke system with a couple of large 47" LED TV's displaying the state of every employee, and 2-3 Android tablets displaying a single view where the employee could "punch" in and out.

Little did we know that "Time & Attendance" would soon turn into the reddest of red oceans!

Then EU 2016 679 happened (or rather came into effect) and we scrambled to bring the product up to speed on the compliance aspect.

In the course of 1,5 years we burned through 3 volumes - an advanced one with a very specific target: that single customer. Later we lowered the ambitions - volume 3 was 'watered down' on tricks like keyboard shortcuts and advanced report-building and background job running/management, more.

Meanwhile the world miraculously kept turning, the initial customer had decided to go with another (more integrated) system, COVID-19 fell out of public interest and our first (letter of intent) customer on volume 2-3 threw in the towel, and left us with just one test customer.

They just recently came back with some very disappointing news: it's too difficult!

That's the TL;DR of it all

How do you move on from this?

That's a very precise to the point kind'a question! Every fibre in my body told me to do a classic 'mic drop' and move on – but we didn't; we stayed and pivoted to do a somewhat different kind of service. Read on in the next installment of this series (but a small spoiler alert is due: even the bluebox didn't make the cut in the end, but more on that as we hustle along...)