ándaga
explore 4.0%
admin 24.0%
research 2.0%
code 71.0%
Code for version 1
Code for version 2 cli
Code for version 2 core
Code for version 3 cli
On January 1, 2018 I decided to make an effort to log all of my free time for a year. I was inspired and intrigued by multiple other time trackers such as Horaire by Devine Lu Linvega and Færeld by Mika Naylor. I originally split my time up into 4 categories: act, learn, rest and social. I logged a total of 36,880 minutes spread across 578 logs. The time tracked was limited to only time that I had 100% control over, besides time spent with my spouse. I was curious to find trends, get insights, and to simply see if I was able to do the act of logging for an entire year
The app was a command line application written in Node and had 6 main commands.
- andaga
log
used for logging new entries - andaga
list
used for listing your entries - andaga
tell
used for telling your totals - andaga
populate
used for populating your SQLite database from a JSON file - andaga
backup
used for backing up your entries to a JSON file - andaga
show
used to bring up a dashboard with statistics on your entries
While I did learn some things through the tracking, the main lesson I learned was more about the process of how I want to use and build tools for my own use. This was one of the first projects that I fully built for myself and used on a daily basis. I realized that I often forgot to log entries either because I didn't like logging that type of entry, social for example, or I would simply forget. Again, this taught me about the type of software I want to both build and use for myself -- one that is simple to understand, easy to use, and flexible both in data format and code. I assume the way I implement this moving forward will continually change. That's where the flexibility comes into play. What exactly it tracks is also continually changing. Many of these factors were taken into account as I began work on version 2 of the project.
Version 2
Starting in 2019, I split this project up into 2 parts
-
andaga-cli, which is a small command line app written in Node. Instead of storing the entries locally, they send them to ándaga-core to be stored.
-
ándaga-core, which is a serverless Node app hosted on Vercel, which will store my entries in a MongoDB database.
The aim for version 2 is largely the same as version 1, but a few details have changed. I'm no longer tracking social and rest time. The whole idea of everything fitting into 4 categories has been thrown out. There will now be no limit on the amount of categories there can be. Also, I'm only tracking the time I spend on personal projects. This can range from building something, learning language, or studying programming paradigms. Hopefully this will give me insight into when I'm productive, when I typically have more energy to study, and what I enjoy working on. My hope if to make this obvious as I build more data visualization into chronica.
Version 3
Starting in 2020, I ported over the cli portion of the application to Scala. I quickly realized this is not what I wanted due to the slow startup time of the JVM. Plus it's a relatively small project that doesn't really deem a full application in my eyes unless it was way more verbose. This caused me to rewrite it yet again into a simple fish script. You can see more details about this in ándaga-cli.