Harvest Watercooler

We are Harvest, a web software company based in New York City.

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Spring has well and truly sprung, and we’ve got another Show & Tell full of surprises! Shawn started things off with another update on our Projects section and the tweaks we’ve been making (among them the addition of Start and End Dates!). Next, we had a trio of Men of Mystery: Cade, Albert, and Danny all showed us some exciting improvements that, yet again, your humble author is barred from discussing in public! Danny also let us know that Harvest for Mac 1.4.1 has been released and is available in the App Store. This update has added retina support and fixed a few key bugs, and we couldn’t be prouder to have it out in the wild!

On the demo front, Brad illustrated exactly how those project start and end dates work, and Vlad sailed above most of our heads with a more in-depth look at one of the mysterious but well-worth-it features we’ve got in the pipeline. Christopher was then responsible for a tiebreaker round determining the winner of the Harvest Oscar Pool, and in a nailbiting finale Devananda came out on top, proving the supremacy of our Harvest Experts in this, as in all things.

And finally, Lorenzo’s choice for this week’s Moment of Zen illustrated the craftsmanship and care that goes into building a flamenco guitar. Despite some breathtaking levels of shade-throwing by the members of Harvest Team España, it was a mellifluous reminder of what a job well done can truly mean.

Every other Friday morning, our entire team gets together for a chat we call Show & Tell. Over the course of an hour, we catch up on project developments and demo our latest works in progress. We end with a Moment of Zen, a three-minute (or less) video selected by a team member.

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Happy birthday to Harvest! Our nine-year anniversary was this last Pi Day (March 14th, or 3/14), and while we didn’t have cake, our last Show & Tell was full of exciting presents!

Shawn kicked things off with some updates on our Projects section. Next, Calina updated us on what Team Kaizen’s been up to, smoothing out some of Harvest’s more confusing corners. Cade and Albert showed us some internal projects that are going to lead to some super exciting developments, but until we’re ready to release them, my lips are very impatiently sealed! Danny gave us a preview of the next round of improvements to Forecast; and finally, Alanna updated everyone on some tweaks we’re making to our support process that will hopefully lead to even happier users!

We only had one demo, but it was a big’un: Jeff showed off the next Harvest for Android release, which should be out in the next couple of weeks. It is amazing and I can’t wait for everyone to get their little paws on it, including your humble Android-using author!

Last but very far from least, Ivo showed us how e-NABLE volunteers are using 3D printers to create artificial limbs in his Moment of Zen. It’s a wonderful reminder of the ways in which technology can be a force for good in the world, when paired with users determined to make things better!

Every other Friday morning, our entire team gets together for a chat we call Show & Tell. Over the course of an hour, we catch up on project developments and demo our latest works in progress. We end with a Moment of Zen, a three-minute (or less) video selected by a team member.

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It’s a couple of weeks after Harvest Winter Summit, and I’ve just about got feeling back in my toes! But if you’re still in the northeast and feeling the chill, fear not, we’ve got some Harvest updates hot off the press for you!

Danny opened things up with some updates we’re super excited about! Our latest release to Harvest for Mac is making its way through the App Store approval process. In the meantime,  you can download it directly here! We also have a beta group for some updates to the Harvest/Forecast integration; if you’d like to join the party, just drop us a line! We’ve also formally retired the old Manage > Projects section in favor of our new Projects section.

Patrick introduced us to a new team within Harvest: Patrick, Pez (more on him later!), and Dan are now on Team Kaizen, a group focused on continuously improving our tools. As opposed to some of our other teams, which often work on bigger releases, these guys are dedicated to finessing what’s already there. They’ve already made some very appreciated changes, and we’re all looking forward to what’s to come!

Next, we had a demo from Pez on...Pez! He’s our newest Harvester, coming at you from Manchester, England! Arun also showed us some updates to Forecast, including the ability to assign company-wide holidays.

Finally, Karla shared her Moment of Zen with us: a speedy explanation of why February only has 28 days. If you feel like you haven’t had nearly enough Roman emperors in your day (as I so often do), give it a watch, and then bask in your newfound knowledge. Curate, ut valeatis, amici!

Every other Friday morning, our entire team gets together for a chat we call Show & Tell. Over the course of an hour, we catch up on project developments and demo our latest works in progress. We end with a Moment of Zen, a three-minute (or less) video selected by a team member.

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At our last Show & Tell we announced that we’d hit the milestone of forty team members, but we’ve surpassed expectations just as quickly: we’re now forty-two Harvesters strong! Nearly all of us are currently in New York for Harvest Winter Summit, and the office definitely feels like a full house!

We kicked things off with a few exciting announcements, first of which was that Courtney and Devananda recently joined Harvest as our eighth and ninth Harvest Experts—we’re a proper little horde of support-givers! We also recently upgraded our SSL certificates to the highest rating possible. And finally, we tweaked our Contact Us page to make getting in touch even easier.

Danny updated us on an upcoming integration—I can’t spill the beans just yet, but if you like integrations, then you’ll definitely be psyched for this one! We’re also almost ready to release a new version of our Mac app that’s going to make a bunch of our users very happy.

Next up, we saw demos from Danny and Albert. Danny showed us some additions to the Harvest/Forecast integration that are in the pipeline, and Albert showed us a jaw dropping new approach to signing in that’s coming later this year! This Show & Tell was full of awesome developments that I still have to be pretty vague on, but trust me, the suspense will be very worth it!

We finished things off with something I don’t have to be mysterious about at all: our Moment of Zen! This week’s was chosen by Jennifer, and is a catchy ditty about loneliness. Everybody can feel lonely sometimes, but if we all know that, maybe we can take the time to reach out to each other just that little bit! Coming at you from the decidedly un-lonely Harvest HQ, over and out!

Every other Friday morning, our entire team gets together for a chat we call Show & Tell. Over the course of an hour, we catch up on project developments and demo our latest works in progress. We end with a Moment of Zen, a three-minute (or less) video selected by a team member.

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It’s a new year, and with it Harvest has hit a new milestone: there are now forty of us on the team! Forty is a lot of things: it’s the international dialing code for Romania, it’s a freeway that stretches from California to North Carolina, and it’s the highest number ever counted to on Sesame Street! It’s a pretty good place to be, but we’re even more excited to hit forty-one, forty-two, and all the numbers ahead of us!

Danny opened Show and Tell with some exciting news. We recently released updates to both our iPhone and Android apps, with even more updates on the horizon. We’ve also given our homepage a bit of a refresh for the new year!

After that, Shawn gave us some more good news—our new Projects section is now live for all Harvest users! Evan gave us a quick presentation on Harvest for Mac, including a demo of an update that’s just about ready for release and that we couldn’t be more excited about!

And speaking of our milestone, we met Ivo, our newest Harvester! Ivo joins us from Bulgaria, and as an Egyptology major, may have overtaken your humble author and her creative writing Ph.D. as the Harvester with the most esoteric academic background! He’s also one of a few team members with pet snakes, so his presentation sparked some lengthy chatting about jars of flies, which makes me so excited for Winter Summit, I cannot tell you.

Finally, Piotr shared his Moment of Zen with us, a video about how we use objects to connect to each other and the world around us, and about how that might not always be a bad thing. At least, that’s the excuse we’re all using for why we’re Googling brass pineapples after watching it. Until next time, everyone!

Every other Friday morning, our entire team gets together for a chat we call Show & Tell. Over the course of an hour, we catch up on project developments and demo our latest works in progress. We end with a Moment of Zen, a three-minute (or less) video selected by a team member.

[harvest]

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On the first day of Christmas, my true love brought to me: Show & Tell 35! I could try to make this entire post fit the theme (fiiiiive pending timesheet approvals!), but I’ll grant our collective holiday wish and just tell you what we’re up to instead.

  Shawn kicked things off with a few exciting updates: a new Stripe checkout process is available that makes getting paid even simpler! Our emails have been redesigned to be a bit prettier for your inbox, and we’re now in the very final stages of our Projects rollout. We also had some news about our larger development plans for 2015, and seriously, if you thought Santa was good to your Harvest account this year, just wait.

  Danny compared Forecast’s development to Harvest’s (spoiler alert: Forecast is growing really quickly!), and showed off some new features that will be making their way to Forecast very soon. We also met another new Harvester, Piotr! He’s currently coming at us from sunny Dublin, but is relocating to Harvest Annexe: Spain very soon. This means 1) my travel plans are weak, man; and 2) my ceaseless lobbying for Harvest Summer Summit: España gains strength! We also had updates on some nifty internal projects from Albert and Jon.

  Our Moment of Zen this week was from Brad, who shared a talk from Ze Frank called “Are You Human?” Come for the jokes, stay for...the quiet contemplation of our own mortality? And a partridge in a pear tree!

Every other Friday morning, our entire team gets together for a chat we call Show & Tell. Over the course of an hour, we catch up on project developments and demo our latest works in progress. We end with a Moment of Zen, a three-minute (or less) video selected by a team member.

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

No, not the holidays, the first news item out of our latest Show and Tell: our new Projects section has been released to everyone! This has been a long time in the making, and we’re super excited to share it with all of our users. If you have feedback, please send it our way; we always want to hear what you’re thinking!

We had news from Warwick on some Ops updates—they happen far behind the Harvest scenes, but help make our system run as securely and smoothly as possible! We also got an update on some exciting developments in the works for Forecast, some of which should be on its way to Forecast users very soon. 

Then, a presentation that’s always exciting: a new Harvester! Jennifer’s our newest Harvest Expert (best team in Harvest, y/y?), joining us from Arizona. She loves Harry Potter (Yay!), Slytherin (Boo hiss! Wait, I think they like that!), and Disneyland, and she’s already making great contributions to the team.

And finally, our Moment of Zen was from Trey, another one of our Harvest Experts! His pick is a quick talk about opposites, discussing how different points of view may seem completely incompatible, but in reality may both be true. In navigating our world, whether it’s neighborhoods, people, or Hogwarts houses, keeping an open mind and a wider perspective will always serve you well. To new horizons!

Every other Friday morning, our entire team gets together for a chat we call Show & Tell. Over the course of an hour, we catch up on project developments and demo our latest works in progress. We end with a Moment of Zen, a three-minute (or less) video selected by a team member.

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Hacksgiving 2

Last year, we turned the days before Thanksgiving into Hacksgiving – a time to put aside our normal work responsibilities and try something different. Harvesters used that time to play with new technologies, build out experimental features, improve our internal tools, and to have a little fun. It was such a hit that we decided to do it again this year.

Today, we wrapped up Hacksgiving 2 with a company-wide video call. Once again our team delivered an incredible variety of work for 2 1/2 day so hacking. Just take a look:

For our customers

Better Contact Form: improvements to our support contact form

Forecast Two Factor Authentication: makes your Forecast account extra secure

Harvest API Browser: a tool for building and evaluating API requests

IFTTT Integration: a set of recipes for use with IFTTT

Shunter: a tool for deploying new and experimental features in Forecast

SHA-2 Test: a method for testing and reporting whether or not a browser can support modern SSL certificates

Internal Tooling

Admin to Bootstrap: moving our admin tooling to the Bootstrap CSS framework

Cooking with ChemKit: better automated QA testing

Docker Dev Environments: a way to ease the set-up time for our developers

Harvest Feature Request: a new way of keeping track of feature requests from our customers

Mission Control 2.0: improvements to an internal tool born during last year’s Hacksgiving

Paperboy Updates: improvements to our internal discussion tool

Party!: a Mac app for using Co-op

Prism: a Chrome Extension that brings images to Trello

Orb: a tool for evaluating the our build times

Zendesk Product Flagger: makes it crystal clear which product (Harvest or Forecast) our customers are writing in about

Zendesk Support Assistant: adds important information to our customer support tickets

Experimental Projects

Android Geofenced Timers: timers that start or stop based on your location

Apple Watch UI: some examples of how Harvest might look on the Apple Watch

Harvest for Mac Nueue: a new version of our Mac App written in Swift

That’s a pretty incredible list. You can expect to hear more about some of these things over the coming weeks and months!

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Renovations at Harvest HQ (NYC) began this week. A new interior look with 40 workstations and beautiful furnishing coming together over the next couple months.

Related: Check out the renovation process of our last office space in Soho - the6thfloor.tumblr.com

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The Thursday before Halloween, Harvest HQ threw a party for the team in New York, as well as out-of-towners who happened to be in-towners that day (Joschka and Arun), and a few friends, too!

We took a vote on what scary movie to watch, and you can tell the 90s nostalgia runs strong with this bunch as Hocus Pocus won the night.

The other major winners of the night? Costumes, meatballs (no pics of those, we ate them all), and babies (which are their own sort of little meatballs, if you ask us).

Here’s some of our favorite pics from the Harvest Halloween!

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Listen to some stories from the early days of Harvest in this podcast about finding your first customers.

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Although Harvest is based in New York City, nearly two-thirds of our team work from elsewhere around the world. Twice a year, we bring everyone together for a gathering we call the Harvest Summit. At our latest Summit, we stayed at the Mohonk Mountain House in upstate New York.

Many of us went on a treacherous hike up a mountain. My fingers are sweating right now thinking about the final ascent between two boulders–but it was worth it for the photo op at the summit.

We swam, ran, paddle-boarded, sun-bathed, hiked, and hugged one another too many times. We had a meeting or two, or three. We talked about work. We talked about nothing and everything. We celebrated our projects with performances and singing. We might have laughed. We fed horses and got bit by horses. We went fishing and the fish bit. And then we took a bus back to Harvest HQ.

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This week’s Show & Tell was short and sweet, much like Scotland’s dreams of independence. (If anyone needs me, I’ll be weeping into my arisaid.)

We opened with updates from Danny and Shawn. Customers are flocking to Forecast—in fact, Forecast is growing faster than Harvest did at this stage! We’ve also opened Projects Beta to a big new group of beta users, and it should be coming to wide release very soon!

We’ve also spent this week in a BUGMASH!, tackling some niggling issues and giving some of the hidden parts of Harvest some love. Hopefully we’ll have another update about how everything went at the next Show & Tell!

Next, Cade demoed a super exciting new feature: you can now mark your expenses as billable or nonbillable! Check out our blog post for a more thorough explanation of what this means, and how it will make both your invoices and your reports more powerful. Lorenzo also showed us a cool new update coming to our Xero integration that we think will be pretty exciting for a lot of you! We'll have some announcements later on. 

And finally, Jeff sent us off to the weekend in unforgettable (and slightly NSFW due to sweary) style with this inspirational speech. From the locker room to the weekend: onward!

Every other Friday morning, our entire team gets together for a chat we call Show & Tell. Over the course of an hour, we catch up on project developments and demo our latest works in progress. We end with a Moment of Zen, a three-minute (or less) video selected by a team member.

[harvest]

Do you like haiku?

Write one, in the Android app!

(Or just ASCII art)

[harvest]

This Show & Tell opened with announcements from BOTH co-founders: it is a veritable foundry up in here! First, Danny updated us on our mobile apps. Not only did we just release Harvest for Android 1.6, but a release to our iPhone app with some VERY cool updates is also in the pipeline, and should be out later in the month!

Next, Shawn led a company-wide retrospective on an issue with recurring invoices that affected a small group of our customers: how it happened, why it happened, and what we’ve done to make sure it doesn’t happen again! After that, he gave us another mini-update on the progress of our new Projects section, and announced a special Bugmash week later this month, where some of our developers will be stomping their way through some bugs! 

And then the demos! Warwick talked us through Harvest’s security procedures and protocol. I’m afraid I can’t say much more about it, but let’s just say the phrase “undisclosed locations” was used, more than once, in earnest. Arun also gave us an update on Forecast, which is now available as a subscription!

For our Moment of Zen, Katie shared a short, wordless piece on the porters who trek up and down mountains in Peru, reminding us to stay conscious of how other people help us along our way. It’s an easy thing to overlook, but missing it means missing a large part of the beauty of our world. To open eyes, and open hearts!

Every other Friday morning, our entire team gets together for a chat we call Show & Tell. Over the course of an hour, we catch up on project developments and demo our latest works in progress. We end with a Moment of Zen, a three-minute (or less) video selected by a team member.

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Reader, we survived summer Harvest Summit. There was team-building. There were sing-a-longs. There was some interpretive drumming I’m still not quite ready to talk about publicly. But we’re back, better than ever, and with even more Harvesty stuff to share!

This Show & Tell opened with a few words from Danny. We’ve updated our pricing for Forecast, switching from project- to people-based pricing in a move that we think better serves our customers. We’ve also made a few tweaks to some of our emails and internal processes that make things even smoother, both for us and our users!

Next, the demos! Lorenzo, with an assist from Christopher, showed off a new way we track our support team’s stats. We place a lot of importance on getting back to people quickly and helpfully, and this is a fantastic way to keep an eye on how we’re doing. Evan demonstrated even more neat stuff in the pipeline for our iPhone app, and Andrew showed the latest version of our new Projects section, which is so close to general release I can almost taste it! (Tastes like productivity!)

And finally—could it be?! This week’s Moment of Zen was from your humble narrator! Meghan, now talking in the formal third person, shared an excerpt from a BBC documentary about how dogs have learned to interpret human emotions in the same way we do. It is a wide, wide world out there, but what connects us all is the search for love and understanding. May we all find a little more of it this weekend!

Every other Friday morning, our entire team gets together for a chat we call Show & Tell. Over the course of an hour, we catch up on project developments and demo our latest works in progress. We end with a Moment of Zen, a three-minute (or less) video selected by a team member.