It is absolutely absurd how much extra value-producing work you'll get done if tasks which routinely take you 10 minutes take 5 minutes and tasks which routinely take you 2 minutes just don't happen.

If you need some inspiration on what to put on it, I have an article on the topic somewhere... Here we go. http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/02/09/dashboard-design-for-met...

If you are using Django you can get your daily/hourly reports that way pretty easily - set up a cron job to call something based on this...

#!/usr/bin/python

from django.core.management import setup_environ

from datasvcs import settings

setup_environ(settings)

from django.core.mail import send_mail

from django.contrib.auth.models import User,Group

from yourapp import models

# Do model query magic here - compile report as a string.

send_mail('Daily report',report-text,'[email protected]',['[email protected]'])

Smart man. Aside from customer support information, everything on my dashboard is cached for 24 hours. I do this specifically because I used to waste far, far too much time sitting on Google Analytics mashing refresh. Mashing refresh on the dashboard just shows me the same thing I saw that morning. (I have a URL available which forcibly purges the cache, but it requires me to type in something like i-have-nothing-more-important-to-do-than-this in my URL bar. I think I've used it maybe twice.)

Once I was on a team using Flyspray and one of our developers hacked it to display a real-time score. He had some convoluted algorithm that took into account percent completed, criticals, and priority. Everybody started working the number, trying to get it higher. It was great and become quite competitive. We'd even talk about our score with marketing and clients. The only problem followed a beta test when the client opened a ton of fixes. The number sank like stone. Not a big problem though. The developer tweaked his algorithm and bingo. . . our score was soon back where it belonged.

Unit Testing Achievements : http://exogen.github.com/nose-achievements/

The Game-ification of Everything (watch the last 6 mins or so if nothing else) : http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Bo...

surely there's an enterprise developer-motivation product hiding in here somewhere...

Shouldn't you have instead started a new round of the "game" and worked to fix the bugs -- thus improving your score legitimately?

We had two problems. One, the developer who wrote the algorithm was the sort of guy who needed to constantly tweak the system. He was a great coder, but he also couldn't produce unless he played a few tricks or hid an easter eggs. So, he kept screwing with the score, making it blink red or suddenly drop and return to normal. We joked that he needed to sell his algorithm to Google. It was fun, but doomed.

The second problem was that marketing started taking the number seriously. They love the numbers, don't they? We were a web shop and at constant war over real estate and advertising. The unwritten law was, anything that marketing took seriously, needed to be screwed with.

My favorite feature was hooking it up to loudspeakers and playing a particular sound from their game every time the business made money, with the sound corresponding to how much money they made.

They eventually disabled it, because the constant interruptions were starting to annoy people. This is a nice problem to have.

http://github.com/russss/arduino-gauges

I also helped out with the analogue tweet-o-meter from a couple of weeks ago:

http://vimeo.com/9352631

I have to say that I'm slightly confused by this picture. On one hand, the post, the pixelation of the numbers and the support guy story make it sound like it's a real picture, but there's definitely something off, no? It looks like a mock-up to me, but I can't decide if it's just a clean design on a nice display…

Still, even at $10k it is absurdly cheap relative to the value generated.

  spent three weeks getting the CSS exactly right

You'd probably knock something very similar to that out in two days, probably that functionally served the same purpose.

Panic and Co. would rather spend a LOT more time on it to make it beautiful and captivating to look at, then spend a chunk of change on a fantastic monitor to display it on.

This is why people pay for Panic apps.

Here's a mockup of it:

http://www.massiveblue.com/clients/carbonmade/pulse/

Note: The figures are bogus.

I'm always interested to get glimpses into these internal status pages / apps,

Very nice all in one interface with time, appointments, news, and weather. I really like this idea...

http://trac.osuosl.org/touchscreen

What I really like about the developer icons, is that even in an image that size, I can still see quite quickly who is on what projects. Very cool indeed.

The thing, however, that I really love, is the simplicity.