1. Where were you born?
Assam (North East) - India
2. Favourite Hobby?
Playing with Bat and Ball
3. Favourite Quote?
"Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it." - Rabindranath Tagore
4. Favourite Band?
Fossils Band (Kolkata)
5. Favourite Food?
Hilsa fish in Mustard gravy
6. Post-pandemic - Where Do You Want To Travel First?
Queenstown, New Zealand
7. What's a fun fact people may not know?
I made students believe that I was a new teacher at a private arts school being a student on the very first day of the course.
8. What’s your favorite part about your job at Truckit?
Bringing up design culture among folks
Understanding some of the most common freight shipping acronyms related to logistics and transportation will assist you in tackling quotes and shipping contracts with confidence. We have collated some of the most common freight terms that you will see here on Truckit.net when discussing your freight listing with one of our Transport Providers & Customer Support Staff.
Owner Operator
Freight Broker/Agent
A Freight broker is an agent between shippers and carriers. Instead of taking possession of the freight, the broker facilitates communication between the shipper and the carrier. They’re the ones making sure the handoff goes smoothly between carriers and shippers, and that freight arrives safely & on time.
Some shippers like working with freight brokers because they have a single point of contact from point A to point B while their freight moves to its destination. Working with a broker can eliminate the need to negotiate with a carrier, planning routes, and tracking freight. Some carriers also like working with freight brokers to optimise their routes and minimise dead kilometers, boosting their earnings in less time.
Cubic Weight
Also known as Volumetric Weight, and is a pricing technique for commercial freight transport which assigns a weight based on the volume of an item. For example, many pallet carriers use the cubic weight conversion of 1m3 = 333kg. Even though an item may only weigh 4kg, due to its size, it may be 15kg of cubic weight. For example, a large blanket might be relatively light, but large in size.
Door to Door / Depot to Depot
Single Transit Insurance
Consignee/Consignor
Consignment Note
Flatbed
A flatbed trailer is a typical open deck trailer that has no roof nor sides. It is mainly used for transporting heavy, oversized, wide and indelicate goods such as machinery, building supplies or equipment. The flatly shaped body makes it much easier to load and unload goods using ramps or lifting equipment.
Surcharges
A surcharge is an extra fee charged by a company to cover costs of one form or another. One example is a payment surcharge which may be charged by some merchants when a customer elects to pay by cheque, credit card, charge card or debit card. This covers the merchant’s costs (usually bank costs) of accepting this payment.
Other types of charges:
Dangerous Goods
CAR SPECIFIC:
Auction House
Salvage Yard
Drivable
Goods in Car
Driven Service
One of the benefits of using the Truckit Provider app is that you can share your location with customers, allowing them to keep up to date with their delivery.
The first time you login to the app you will be shown a popup with a brief overview of Truckit's location tracking. You will then be prompted to set your Location Settings to 'Always'.
In order for the tracking to function properly you will need to select 'Always Allow' when prompted. This is a technical requirement to ensure a good tracking experience for your customer, otherwise the tracking will not function. But don't worry, you will have full control over when you wish to be tracked, as you will read below.
Before you leave to go and collect a job, make sure you go into the job screen and click 'Start Job'. When starting the job you will also be given the options to:
With Truckit tracking you are in full control, to turn tracking on or off for all customers, simply use the 'Online' switch on the home screen (see below).
When you are Online, customers who have a job in progress will be able to see your current location on a map as well as an estimate of the distance to the collection or delivery (example below).
When you are Offline, nobody will be able to see your location, only your last known location from when you were last online.
Customers can view your location on a map when their job has been started and you are set to Online. If both of these conditions are met, then the customer will be able to see a map on their listing page that looks something like the below.
Good to know tip: To maintain a level of privacy, there is a zoom limitation on the customer map which means they can not zoom all the way in to see your exact position on the map.
We hope that this assists in your queries about our tracking options! As always, if you have any further questions or queries, please reach out to us on 1800 859 850 or support@truckit.net.
Where were you born? Ipswich, QLD
Do you have any Hobbies? Sports in the form of tennis and golf... Big tennis guy!
Favourite Quote? "Don't sweat the small stuff... and it's all small stuff".
Favourite Band? The Killers
Favourite Food? Woodfired Pizza
Describe yourself in 3 words? Curious, Confident & Jocular
Favourite TV/Book Series? Game of Thrones
Interview with Andrew Erikson - Senior Developer at Truckit.net
How did the idea of the app come about?
I think the idea for the App may even predate the Website actually. No, I'm exaggerating just a little. But it really wasn't long after the Website launched that talk of doing a Mobile App began. I think it was pretty much self-evident that that’s where things were headed. Smartphones changed everyone’s lives… which demanded that Truckit step up and produce, not just an App, but a top-notch App.
Had you developed apps [like this one] previously?
Well, I've been involved in the Development of other Apps, but certainly nothing even remotely close to this one. I think that is just a reflection of the level of bespoke functionality that Truckit has acquired over the years that has made it so much different from everything that came before, certainly in my experience.
How is this app different from others you have done?
The main area that in my experience has set this App apart from others I would have to say is the intricacies and permutations of the User Interfaces, which are required to support several distinct workflows and User Experiences. Truckit is very unique in that aspect, and this has made it quite different to other types of Software I've had the privilege of working with over the years. Besides this, there is also the technology aspect that was new in that we chose to work with a technology that up until that point we had little experience with. All of this has since changed of course.
Can you discuss the agile methodology of software development and talk about its advantages and disadvantages?
Using the Agile methodology has enabled us to adapt and change as the project has progressed and made it possible for us to respond faster to requirement changes and overlooked or poorly designed features that are not obvious at the outset. But this usually comes at the expense of being able to apply more time to the documentation process which can have a detrimental effect over the longer term. It can also be frustrating sometimes to iterate multiple times over the same feature until such time as the stakeholder is happy with it. So there definitely are positives and negatives. Unfortunately, if you are dealing with a project where the full scope of requirements is not yet fully understood, and this was certainly where we found ourselves at the beginning, then Agile is the only method available to you really. The most important aspect of any software project is the ability to adapt to circumstances and understand that what you are dealing with is very often a moving target. Sure, you might settle on all the features to be included in a Version 1, and then a Version 2 after that and so on, but we all know it often doesn't stop there. Versions can be open-ended depending on the success of the product, so I think it’s good in some ways to try and view a software project as a journey rather than a destination, with fixed resting points that define the boundaries between versions. When you look at it like this, and utilise it in this manner, then I think the Agile Methodology makes a lot of sense and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
What were some hurdles you faced, and which was the biggest hurdle you faced during the creation of this app?
There were several hurdles that revolved around deciding what Architecture to go with, but I would probably say the biggest hurdle of all was actually deciding what Technology to use, because I mean, there are so many options out there really. The classical approach to this question may entail reviewing the development skills available to you as a manager, and then making a decision based on this. That is not the approach we took. In fact, we completely put available skills to one side and focused on the pros and cons of each technology independent of other factors, and we continued doing this even after we had started the project. In fact, we made what I would refer to as a 'course correction' a few months into the project after we evaluated another technology that had up until that point been off our radar. The fact that we were prepared to make a huge U-turn like this as far into the project as we were I think emphasises just how important technology choice was for us in the end, thus making it our biggest hurdle, definitely.
After overcoming these roadblocks, how do you think overcoming these issues changed the final product?
I would certainly hope that after each roadblock, the end product would be better. If not, I guess it would make those very roadblocks pretty pointless really. So, roadblocks are a really good thing, and it’s important to try and frame a roadblock as positively as possible. One could take a 'glass half empty' approach and say, "oh well, you know... there is just no solution to this, so let's rather just drop the feature entirely". That is obviously not the approach we here at Truckit, take. Quite the opposite. We welcome roadblocks. We thrive off roadblocks. The challenge of solving a Roadblock is what gets us up in the morning. So, coming back to your question, I wouldn't necessarily say overcoming roadblocks changed the product, but what I would say is that it changed those involved in the product rather, by giving them a sense of confidence and pride in their own abilities, and this I think will stand them in good stead for the future of their careers, as well as the future of this product hopefully.
Can you discuss how you balance addressing client demands with developing complex application software?
That really is the Holy Grail that you have touched on right there... finding that balance. It all comes down to the search for simplicity, and simplicity for a client or user vs a developer can often mean polar opposite things. The more demanding the user requirements, usually the less elegant a software application becomes. Client demands definitely take precedence though. From a software perspective you need to exchange customer for user in the cliche 'the customer is always right'. So, the user is always right and us Developers need to always keep in mind that we are there to support the user rather than the other way around. Ultimately achieving this balance requires a robust architecture that on the one hand is flexible enough so, as to give a Developer enough freedom and control to build more advanced and challenging features, but on the other hand constraining enough so that it forces a Developer to conform and stick within certain defined boundaries defined by the rules of the architecture. So, it’s a delicate balance that comes down to architecture selection I would say.
What steps do you take to prevent an app from crashing?
Software crashes are one of those things as a Developer that, hard as you might try, you simply cannot prevent 100% of the time. So, it’s something you cannot get around unfortunately, kind of like death and taxes. All you can really do is ensure you have a robust framework in place to identify errors when they do occur, and deal with them appropriately so that they cause as little disruption as possible. This requires the following of best-practices to ensure you have error catching code in place. Also, you need to try and ensure that you inform the user in layman’s terms what just happened and what they need to do to be able to continue working. Obviously as a Developer you want to try as hard as possible to recover from the error as seamlessly as possible while invoking the least amount of anger from the User as possible. It can be a real challenge to get all those things right. It's also very important to try and capture as much detail about an error as possible, and then try and ensure that all this detail makes its way into the hands of the Dev team so that they can then try and identify the source of the problem, and hopefully fix it in the next release. Google luckily have a product called Crashlytics which can be very, very helpful in this case.
What are the different testing stages and how does each stage assist in the development of the app?
Testing is all about quality control. Developers that worked on a project will have a natural bias towards much of the functionality in an App, so they should not feature in the Testing phase at all, although a Developer will always need to perform Unit Testing and some other Basic Functionality Testing to make sure their code works as expected before they send it for code review and more advanced internal testing, followed by external testing. In computer jargon we would refer to this as Alpha, followed by Beta Testing. Testing stages are usually dictated by the type and importance of the software being built. For example, testing flight automation software where you are potentially dealing with life and death will have way more stringent testing requirements than say an ecommerce web application that is selling merchandise. During Alpha testing it is important to create a test plan that defines your inputs and expected outputs, so that the success of a test can be easily measured, and then also to ensure that this information flows seamlessly between the Testers and the Developers so that bug and other fixes can be performed within the time sensitivities of the Project and Test Plan. So, it would be an iterative process that repeats indefinitely until such time as all the Tests within the Alpha Test plan succeed, and then it can be moved into Beta Testing. So, each testing stage should result in improvements to the software overall and give confidence to both the Developers of the product, and the users of the product, that everything works as it should.
What’s next - maybe a customer app?
Oh yes, most definitely. We need to strike while the iron is hot.
All I can say is 'WATCH THIS SPACE'
Where were you born? Beijing, China.
Favourite Hobby? Skiing, photography & collecting vinyl!
Favourite Quote? "We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us." - Rabindranath Tagore.
Favourite Band? The Cranberries, Pink Floyd, Tippling Rock.
Favourite Food? Blue Fin Tuna.
Post-pandemic - Where Do You Want To Travel First? I plan to go to Japan and/or Queenstown for skiing!
What's a fun fact people may not know? I hope one day that I can have a band of my own!
What’s your favorite part about your job at Truckit? My favourite part about my job here at Truckit is its diversity and inclusivity.
Where were you born? Durban, South Africa
Favourite Hobby? Music Production
Favourite Quote? "I can’t quote the equations of General Relativity from memory, but nonetheless if I walk off a cliff, I’ll fall." - Eliezer Yudkowsky
Favourite Band? The Brian Blade Fellowship
Favourite Food? King Fish Sashimi
Post-pandemic - Where Do You Want To Travel First? Iceland - some of my favorite sci-fi movies were filmed in Iceland plus I'm a fan of a few musicians from there
What's a fun fact people may not know? I can ride a unicycle at a skatepark
What’s your favorite part about your job at Truckit? Building features that use geo data
Where were you born? Brisbane, Queensland
What are your favourite hobbies? Playing video games, reading, live music & seeing friends!
In a post-pandemic world, where do you want to travel first? France, maybe the Netherlands. I want to see all of the art galleries and see the pretty buildings
What is your favourite food? Cheese Pizza
Do you have a favourite band? Tool
What is a quote that means most to you? Change your thoughts, change the world
Do you have any fun facts that people may not know about you? I am a crazy cat lady but only have ONE cat, I have 24 tattoos & I have met John Jarratt
What's your favourite part about your job at Truckit? Being able to resolve issues for our customers & providers, alongside the cool people I work with
If you need assistance with your listings or bookings - call our amazing customer service team today on 1300 859 850
Lockdowns in Sydney and Melbourne may have stopped millions of people from moving around, but they have done nothing to stop Australians moving their cars, boats and caravans with Brisbane-based freight marketplace TruckIt.net reporting a 60% increase in demand for spot freight.
In September, Truckit users posted more than 17,000 freight jobs on the marketplace, a 65% increase on June this year and 60% on the same month last year. Many freight categories - cars, motorcycles, caravans and boats - have more than doubled in the three months to the end of September.
Truckit’s digital marketplace matches people wishing to freight large items with transport operators. The operators range from sole operators with one vehicle up to large multi-vehicle businesses.
Established by Queensland-born, Scottish rugby international Robbie Russell, Truckit.net is at the forefront of Australia’s rapidly-growing on-demand freight industry that is becoming an increasingly important part of the overall $100 billion a year freight industry.
Mr Russell said demand for freight had grown exponentially over recent months as people were unable to move items themselves and had to rely on the country’s army of truck drivers.
“With large trucking companies operating at full capacity, the spot market is often the only way they can get larger items moved around,” he said. “Despite the lockdowns, people are still buying and selling cars and boats and caravans and need to be able to get them from one place to another.”
“These are tough times for everybody in lockdown but it is essential we keep the goods moving around the country.”
While multiple states and territories have announced the closure of their borders, the freight and logistics industry has been deemed an essential service and are therefore exempt from border closures.
Truckit works by letting customers simply list their item on Truckit.net for free and receive competitive quotes from interested vehicle operators. The booking, transaction and delivery process is managed directly between the freight owner and the operator.
Since it was first established 2012, Truckit has taken nearly 750,000 listings with deliveries covering more than 100,000,000 kilometres. At any one time there is about $3 million worth of freight jobs posted on the site and available for truckers to quote on.
The idea for the business had its origins in Mr Russell’s return home from international rugby career and moving goods around the world and the country to set-up a new home in Brisbane.
“At the time there were a few freight marketplaces in the UK but it was very difficult to organise freight in Australia,” he said. “Getting a car moved from one city to another or some furniture across town shouldn’t require dozens of phone calls.”
The site now has more than 400,000 customers who have posted a listing on the site and more than 4,500 vetted truckers ready to quote on individual jobs.
