this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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Working on a FOSS tool to convert raw work time data into a clean report for your boss or client. Any interest? (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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It's almost done (it would take one or two weeks to clean it up for FOSS release). It's a CLI tool. It works great for my use case, but I'm wondering if there's any interest in a tool like this.

Say you have a simple time-tracking tool that tracks what you do daily. The only problem is that there are gaps and whatnot, which might not look nice if you need to send it to someone else. This tool fixes pretty much all of that.

Main format is a JSON with a "description", and either "duration" or a "start"/"end" pair. It supports the Timewarrior format out of the box (CLI Time tracking tool).

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Outputting clean reports is one thing, but "normalizing" the time to make it look better, or as though I'm more busy, is something else entirely. I appreciate the effort, but this tool has the very real potential to get a contractor or employee sued for time fraud. I highly recommend against normalization of time data. The contractor either worked a full 30 or s/he didn't. It's black and white. Saying s/he worked for 30 when s/he worked for 25 is a lie, and subject to lawsuits and further legal action.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago (3 children)

"they" uses the same number of characters as "s/he" and flows more naturally

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm not sure why "they" isn't used more often to refer to the unknown. This is what we were taught back home when we learned English.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Mainly, this is because I was writing official docs, then took a quick Lemmy break, but my brain stayed "official" hahahahaha that's all. 'they' should absolutely be used in this colloquial context.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No judgment at all, I'm just wondering. :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

No judgement felt lol

Someone else called me out on it, too, and I decided to have fun with it instead of fixing it hahahaha if you can't laugh at yourself...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Sure, sure. But s/he reading this might appreciate the use of special characters to improve his/her password entropy.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Don't know why you would jump to that conclusion straight away. Mín billable hours and time spent thinking on the problem is a thing. Taking regular 5m breaks (pomodoro technique) also helps with getting things done and so on and people should be paid for it.

I mean, you should technically stop the clock if the wife calls to ask if there's pasta at home but nobody really cares.

Adding significant amount of hours to a report would not be ethical but adjusting 10% to get paid for time laying in bed thinking about problems is still ethical from my point of view. It's way more value than most meetings.

Your cultural context way vary.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

What someone feels is ethical and what may be legal don't always match. From a legal point of view in every country I've worked at as a contractor, "time laying in bed thinking about problems" isn't billable time.

As a personal time management solution, I don't see any issues here. As a billable time report maker, it has the very real potential to get the user into legal turmoil.

Use at your own risk and made damn sure that the laws match your idea of ethical billable hours, is all I'm saying.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago

This sounds really cool. I have actually made something similar (unpublished and quite hacky though).

I work as a self-employed contractor and must report my times in varying standardised formats, depending on the client or agency I am working with. My input data comes from TimeWarrior (like yours) and I usually just output CSV data so I can copy-paste that into a provided excel template.

Quantizing the data is usually the most essential step as the templates often restrict accuracy. I find it strange that many of the comments here presume this kind of transformation to be fraudulent.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't get it.

Where's Saddam?

I'll head back to linuxmemes now.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Lmao, its everywhere now isnt it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Idk what it is so I guess it's not everywhere.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

As someone who works atrocius times of their own volition & has to create a clean timesheet every end of the month, this is a great idea -buyt there are too many special rules to consider imo - also I never properly track time (keep forgetting) but reconstruct work times from emails, chats & calendar entries :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Could have some kind of floating timer window/widget in your bar so you don't forget

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The problem is working on different computers & sometimes switching back and forth between private time and work time. That'd require actual button presses or something to "clock" in/out

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ah I see. At my previous company we developed an in house clock in/out system that I always forgot to use. Never did but I wanted to build a big red button with an Arduino that clocked me in and out with the API and showed a timer

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Big red button might help, but when I'm "in the zone" with coding, normally I forget everything around me :) One moment I'll be browsing the web on my leisure time, and then I have an idea for one of my work projects, switch to that and "wake up" 8 hours later with lots of stuff done and no idea when I "clocked in" - that's usually when I do "ls -lR" on my project folders and check file timestamps :D

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

This makes me glad not to be on the clock, I suck at remembering to do that stuff.

Though I tend to hyper focus on one thing for 4 or 5 hours at a time anyway

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I just say I worked X hours per day, above my log entries describing what I did that day. Why do they need anything more than that?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Sometimes I work on a larger project that is split up in different sub projects, that were sold separately and are maybe paid by different departments. So I need to at least spilt those up.
Also it's often easier to follow what exactly was done, when I differentiate more between my tasks and not just put a collective line there - just like small commits are more helpful than one large one.

But maybe I understood you wrong...?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

I do my time tracking in org-mode, and export it to JIRA once a day or so. It is quite a specific/tailored setup, written in a mix of elisp and, well, org-mode (specific names and tags are used to configure some settings), but I'd love to look at this tool to see if I can extend my workflow by using it for the "massaging into a nicer shape" part. I might end up writing some extensions for either side (org-mode input format and JIRA REST calls output format).

My current tooling quantizes everything by rounding start and end times to the nearest full 15 minutes, and starting a new task at the end time of the previous one when clocking in, so that my team lead does not have to report so many fractions of hours to higher layers.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (3 children)

OT: What program are these diagrams made with? I've seen them floating around recently and really like the looks of them.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's Exclidraw (dark mode)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Thanks! I use Excalidraw occasionally, but only in light mode. Derp.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Looks like excalidraw to me, but not sure!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

This looks like draw.io to me, but I could be wrong.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

So this requires some kind of existing tracking software? Are there existing FOSS options for that part?

My current job doesn't need time tracking (yet?, some of my work is for the sister company) but a job I worked before had us clock in and out for specific projects on a computer, but the subscription ended and we were using a UI glitch to continue using it and literally cheat engine to make it still export the files for the office to use.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Kimai is a great option

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

An existing FOSS time tracking software I like is Timewarrior (CLI)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Org mode has a time tracking feature, dunno about report generation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I would use it, let me know if you need any testing or feedback. What is it written in?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Python

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

“FOSS” here doesn’t mean hosted exclusively on proprietary Microsoft GitHub, right?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yes, I’ll host the source code on GitHub. I could consider mirroring it on Sourcehut if there’s enough interest, but I prefer the PR and Issues workflow on GitHub for collaboration. Plus, more people tend to have GitHub accounts than GitLab or Sourcehut, which makes it easier for contributors.

I get the concern about Microsoft, and while I’m not a fan of the company, GitHub has advantages that are hard to beat, especially for community reach. As for OpenAI potentially using the code, personally I don’t mind if my own code gets used for AI training.

I’ll be using an MIT license, in case you're curious. Everyone is free to mirror it anywhere.

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