How I Log My Time In My Sleep

Photograph by: apops, Fotolia.com

Every day last week, I woke up to see that my development time had been logged.

But I haven't logged in to FreshBooks since 2015.

Like many other development teams, our company uses FreshBooks to track our time and invoice clients.  It's a great tool with all the features we need for day-to-day operations. However, as a programmer, over the years I have failed to use this tool properly, and neglected my time logging duties until it was absolutely necessary. This neglect often required "time logging parties" with other members of my team who had been equally neglectful, which was a kind misnomer for stressful sessions of reading through e-mails, project management tools, git logs, hand-written notes, and anything else to help us remember just how much time we spent working on something.

And, like many other development teams, I work on multiple projects per day -- sometimes per hour!

For me, the most frustrating thing about logging time is essentially having to record my operations so many times. First, when I tell a client what I'm going to do. Again when I code the thing I was supposed to do. Then, I write fairly detailed commit messages describing what I did. Finally, I communicate with the client that the thing was done. And now I have to write all this again in an time tracking tool?! Ugh.

It doesn't often get done. And when it does, it isn't efficient. Time should be logged in-process.

I've tried stopwatch solutions, but they simply don't work when you forget to hit the button. And I'm too busy (forgetful) to hit the button. Or, I get distracted with something else going on, or a client calls, or I need to task switch immediately, etc. etc.

Why can't I just code and have my time tracked as I code?

Well, now I can, thanks to WakaTime.

WakaTime advertises itself as FitBit for programmers, and that's a pretty spot-on description. In the same way that FitBit tracks your statistics just by you doing your everyday tasks, WakaTime tracks your time spent in your IDE of choice (Vim, Eclipse, Android Studio, and many more) and automatically uploads that information to the web. At the end of the day, just by coding, you've got a picture of everything you've worked on for the day. For free.

"Yes!"

To complete the puzzle, though, I needed to get the time out of WakaTime and in to FreshBooks. There wasn't anything out there that did that for me, so I created it:

https://github.com/GoGoCarl/WakaTimeFreshBooks

WakaTimeFreshBooks is a Java command-line client that pulls the time logged for a given day in WakaTime and pushes that information as time entries into FreshBooks. After a couple minutes of setting up my API keys and matching up the WakaTime projects I wanted to log with FreshBooks projects I wanted to send the time to, I was up and running. Simple, yet effective.

On December 28, 2015, I set this to run as a daily cron job, and I haven't logged time since.

Now eventually, I'll have to edit my time sheets to include useful notes for invoices. And I still need to log out-of-band communications, as well as testing and video conferences (although, WakaTime is working on solutions for those things!). But, for now, I know that my coding time has been submitted, and that it's fairly accurate, which is much more than I could say merely a few weeks ago.

And I didn't have to do anything but code.

--
Carl Scott
Software Developer, Solertium Corporation

Code, Push, Deploy with JitPack

Recently, I released a Java connector for Appygram, available on GitHub in ready-to-use JAR format.  A useful library, for sure, but one glaring omission was the fact that it wasn't available via the popular means of Gradle or Maven.  That, for many, makes it not-so-useful.  Since, for now, I'm the only one working on this connector, having a publishing process that is fast and easy for me is important.

Enter JitPack.

JitPack (currently in Beta) is a package repository for GitHub that builds your GitHub projects on demand and publishes them, ready to download and use via the aforementioned popular means.

For me, this meant adding a pom.xml build file to my project, tagging my latest release, and pushing to GitHub.  Done.  Once I'm finished with my next round of coding and updates, I can do:

git commit
git push
git tag -a 1.0.3 -m "1.0.3"
git push origin 1.0.3

And now, my code is available to the JitPack package repository for everyone to use immediately.

If you're a developer looking for a fast and easy way to get your code available, try JitPack.  It's an interesting approach to skipping the build process and getting code assets available in a way that's easy for users, while being convenient to developers.  Tools like that are definitely gold!

--
Carl Scott
Software Developer, Solertium Corporation