Today, we’re proud to announce our 4th annual WalkaboutNYC Tech Edition. Since organizing our very first WalkaboutNYC in 2010, we’ve nurtured and grown this behind-the-scenes event to showcase the vibrant tech movement in New York City.

WalkaboutNYC Has Grown

• We’ve created an RSVP system, so that you can better plan your schedule, and your day. About 1500 people RSVP’d for sessions at last year’s event, and many used our mobile-friendly view while they were on the go.
• We created a new version of WalkaboutNYC, the Agency Edition, where we invited NYC’s independent creative agencies to join in the Walkabout fun.
• For the second year in a row, we’re happy to see WalkaboutSingapore happen!
• For those who don’t live in NYC but want to throw their own Walkabout, we made Walkabout available as an open source project, so that you can share your own behind-the-scenes look at your own city’s tech movement.

Why Do We Do This?

Harvest co-founders Danny Wen and Shawn Liu have always enjoyed taking tours of workspaces. Whether it’s a loft or shared co-working space, they’ve always been inspired to see where companies are born, people spend their time, and products are launched. WalkaboutNYC enables us to share that experience everyone.

Join Us

RSVP now to join us on Friday, May 17th, and meet the entrepreneurs, designers, and engineers who are shaping tomorrow’s technology.

Over the last 7 years, 95 million hours were tracked in Harvest. With each passing year, we’ve labored behind the scenes to change the way you work. Our goal with every Harvest update has been to streamline your workflow, so you can focus on the work that matters most and get more done.

2012 was no different. Whether it was through redesigning the timesheet to make time tracking even faster from any device, or launching a developer platform to provide the ability to track time from any application — we pushed Harvest further last year to make your life easier. To recap, we put together a little story of what we accomplished for our customers in 2012 – The Year In Work.

2013 is already off to a great start with another integration made public, and updates tailored towards helping you communicate better with clients. As always, we invite you to send us feedback on what else you’d like to see this year. For any time tracking integration requests, why not send along the Harvest Developer Platform to the team behind your favorite application? They’ll be able to add Harvest time tracking to their application in 15 minutes.

We look forward to providing you with another stellar year in work.

For the past three years, we’ve been organizing WalkaboutNYC for technology companies, as a way to give people a behind the scenes look at how these companies get work done. Last month, we organized our very first WalkaboutNYC Agency Edition. We invited 28 independent creative agencies to open their doors, and share how they work with the public. We held a kickoff event in downtown New York’s SoHo, to bring together some of the participants, share lunch, and have some interesting discussions related to design and getting work done at an independent creative agency, with sponsorship from Mailchimp and Behance.

During the kickoff, Sam Potts, Communications Designer at IDEO, discussed his circuitous path through the world of design. What may, in retrospect, look like a master plan, was really an unplanned route that included publishing, superhero supplies, travel in China, and now IDEO. Hear why he made the decisions he did, and how he traveled from A to Z.

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While working on a different post today, I realized that we’ve never formally talked about Kaizen, our internal project management/bug tracker/feature request tracker. Sure, we’ve mentioned it in passing a number of times, but we’ve never given you a behind the scenes peek at what Kaizen looks like.

“Kaizen” is a Japanese word meaning “improvement” and refers to a philosophy of continuous improvement of process. It’s the perfect name for a tool that contributes so deeply to the improvement of our products, ourselves and the work we do. In a lot of ways, Kaizen (app) is the embodiment of The Harvest Way: listen to our customers, make it simpler, make it faster, be honest and keep improving.

Kaizen as a project/task manager:

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A few weeks ago I downloaded MyFitnessPal to my iPhone. During the 2 weeks that I actually used it (don’t judge!) I noticed something about my behavior. Specifically, being hyper aware of my choices, actually changed the way I consumed food and the way I chose to spend my down time. I started bringing lunch and started exiting the subway a few stops earlier in order to lengthen my walk to work.

If you’ve ever used Mint or any other budgeting apps, you may have experienced the same phenomenon. Understanding where your money goes makes you much more aware before you spend it. You end up being more focused. It might even inspire you to create a budget for yourself and stick to it.

While using MyFitnessPal, I realized that the relationship I was developing with this fitness app was similar to the one I have with Harvest. Since joining Harvest more than a year ago, I have found that entering time as I go has a huge personal benefit. Sure, it’s faster and it ensures that the time data is accurate, but the real benefit for me is that it helps me manage my time more efficiently. The act of starting a timer makes me more focused. It is the equivalent of making a declaration about what I’m about to do.

Even though Harvest has more than 10 ways for you to enter time as you go, many of you still enter at the end of the day, week or even, month. If you’re one of those people, I’d recommend you give track-as-you-go a try. It may seem awkward at first, but it becomes second nature rather quickly. Give it a day. And if you take me up on this challenge, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

A few weeks ago after lunch, Matt and Paul started talking about the fact that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. They wondered if there was something that Harvest could do to support the cause. As others joined in the conversation, it became obvious that almost everyone in the office had been impacted by breast cancer in one way or another. We decided to make something happen.

This month Harvest is donating $10,000 to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation® (BCRF). We decided on BCRF because 91 cents of every dollar spent by the organization goes directly towards breast cancer research and awareness programs. This is an impressive statistic for such a large organization; one we can get behind.

But this isn’t about the money. What we really care about here is awareness. With that in mind, we’re letting our customers change their Harvest color scheme to pink during the month of October (company admins will see a message on their dashboard). We hope that seeing the pink navigation bar will encourage you to ensure that all the people in your life follow the appropriate protocol for early detection.

We hope that during this month you will take some time to think about your health and how you can detect and prevent all forms of cancer.

Earlier this year, we decided to provide internships to students who were interested in working in a technology company like ours. We saw it as a way for us to give back to the next generation of technologists and as a way for us to mentor bright young minds. We wanted to show them another option to use their craft beyond the usual campus tech-related recruiters like large businesses, consulting firms and banking institutions.

Our goal was to provide a program where interns would have a real-world problem solving experience. They’d learn how to work alongside our full-time team and gain exposure to the real challenges we’re solving.

In May, computer science major Anthony Chen joined us in New York. In August, Anthony put together a summary of his experience in the Harvest Academy, an internal blog where we share learnings and ideas. With Anthony’s gracious permission to repost, here’s what he had to say:

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We’ve just come out of our 3rd WalkaboutNYC, and with 3 years under our belt, we’ve learned a lot. For those that don’t know, WalkaboutNYC is a citywide open house event for technology companies. This year’s WalkaboutNYC was our most successful yet, and we’ve had many inquiries from people in other cities who would like to host their own Walkabout. I wanted to share some points about what we did, what we’ve learned, and where we’re headed.

We’re excited to announce that Walkabout is now an open source project.

We’ve had many inquiries from folks around the globe that would like to organize a Walkabout in their own cities, and we couldn’t be happier to hear it. To support these efforts, we have shared our experiences and knowledge about Walkabout on GitHub, to get you started on hosting your own events. Go forth and bring Walkabout worldwide!

We learned that people like structure.

For this year’s WalkaboutNYC, we took a more targeted approach. We set a goal to include about 50 companies (down from 80+ last year), driving traffic to 5 main neighborhoods (sorry Brooklyn), and requiring companies to create an experience led by founders, or lead designers or developers. This framework, utilizing timed events, allowed companies to know what was expected and what to expect. The same is true for attendees with RSVPs — giving them a schedule to follow was loads easier to follow than “go wherever you want.”

Be forewarned, Walkabout is a lot of work. And a lot of time.

We spent 873 hours on WalkaboutNYC this year.

What did we spend so much time on?

• We built a new mobile first website, with a front- and back-end RSVP system and database, and Facebook/Twitter authentication for attendees. This was our intern Joschka’s very first Ruby on Rails project, and led to his first open source project, Harvey.
• Kim did some great design work, from the site, to wall signs, limited edition tote bags, to stickers. The goal this year was to bring a stronger tie between Harvest and WalkaboutNYC, so that people actually know that we organize and support it.
• The rest: outreach and back and forths with companies, sponsorships, press and PR company involvement, and general inquiries.

Coming next: WalkaboutNYC for creative agencies.

Despite the time commitment, we find the experience WalkaboutNYC provides for companies and participants to be a very worthwhile endeavor for the community. Previously, WalkaboutNYC has focused on the technology product community, and we’d like to shift focus to creative agencies this fall. Email us at info@walkaboutnyc.com if you work at a creative agency that is interested in hosting walkabouters this fall, we’d love to hear from you. And keep exploring!

Prior to launching Harvest, Shawn and I were in the thick of operating our web design and development business. During those years, one of our biggest inspirations was seeing how other businesses looked on the inside. The physical office space represented the modern day workshop. Seeing other people’s spaces helped us imagine the type of workspace we wanted to create. How companies divided up their floor, how teams sat together (or not), what they decorated their space with — those were all signals of what the business believed in.

Workspaces continue to inspire us as we build Harvest today. The office is where we spend a big portion of our waking hours, and we want to continue to create the best environment for our team. We still seize opportunities to visit startups and technology companies in NYC and wherever we travel. Seeing photos is one thing but to visit the physical space where ideas come together and speak with the people there — those opportunities are rare.

In 2010, with the momentum of the technology ecosystem rising in New York, we decided to bring that opportunity to a larger audience. What if we organized an “open house for technology companies” so more people can take part in the experience of seeing space and meeting the people behind them? We coined it Walkabout, after all, it’s a journey of discovery and NYC is a fine city for walking. That year, the first WalkaboutNYC event launched with 15 brave, companies opening their doors.

WalkaboutNYC is now in its third year and the event has grown up. Over 55 companies in New York City have committed to the spirit of community and to provide insightful experiences to those that visit. From NYC-rooted companies like Fog Creek Software, Tumblr, Skillshare, Voxel to new transplants like Facebook and Spotify, we couldn’t be more excited about the roster this year.

2012 also marks the year that Walkabout went international. On Friday, May 11th, the first WalkaboutSG took place in the technology capital of Asia, Singapore. It’s tremendously rewarding to see friends latch on and lead this effort in their communities. We are confident that many great things will come out of it for the respective communities.

Hat tip to Karen Schoellkopf, Harvest community manager and the fearless organizer of the event. Without her, Walkabout would not have come together.

On Friday, if you are in NYC, we hope you will take advantage of this opportunity to visit technology companies, see how they work, and meet some great people along the way.

Visit WalkaboutNYC

We’re currently navigating through the maze of acquiring a larger office space in Manhattan as we’ve outgrown our current headquarters. One of the interesting things we’ve found during this process is that the owners of large buildings will sometimes want to see our current office to get a feel for who we are. They want to know what kind of tenant they are about to offer a lease to.

We recently had one such office visit by a prospective landlord. After seeing how we’ve built out our current office and meeting some of our people, she became curious about the type of business we operated. While we can throw around terms like web software and SaaS all day long in our community, the reality is that to most people, what we do here is a foreign concept to them.

I took her through our business, showing her how Harvest is used and what types of customers we have. After getting a grasp of what we did, she looked around the room, eyeing the team, and asked, “What’s everybody doing? Are they just monitoring the website?” After all, the product appears to be working, what else might we need to do? The answer: a lot. As any software business knows, the product itself is just half the work.

To see it from her non-technical point of view, it wasn’t an outrageous question at all. I thought briefly how I would best answer this. Then I began:

Everyone here is a craftsman. Whether our craft is through technology, design or words, every person here is a craftsman. Like devoted woodworkers, we believe the back side of a cabinet is deserving of as much attention as the front side. Being craftsmen, we use our hard-won experience to build a trusted set of tools (whether physical, software or tools of the mind) to solve problems in the best way possible. As a collective, we shape the product and ultimately the entire Harvest service.

Our team is comprised of people who believe in crafting beautiful code, sweating the details and pixels, and working hard to find the right words to express our ideas. At the end of each day, we want to take a step back and say, “that’s our best work yet.”

That’s what everybody is doing here. We’re craftsmen (and women).