Integration with WakaTime to log time working on Github projects

[alexanderjeurissen]

Just came across this awesome project: http://wakatime.com It's a service that supplies numerous plugins for all common text editors, and logs the time your actually typing code. When integrated with Github it also logs the time you work on a certain commit.

they have a REST API (https://wakatime.com/developers/) so importing the data from there servers shouldn't be much of a hassle. Then we could opt to map the Github repositories to a project in hours.

I'm curious to see what your take is on this.

[jnillo]

What is the different between Wakatime and Hours? I think that both projects have the same target. Let me know if I am wrong.

[alexanderjeurissen]

WakaTime is a service that uses a plugin in your code editor to estimate how much time you spent coding. It would be nice if the hours in wakatime could be imported to Hours

[Marthyn]

I really like this idea, gonna work on it tonight. Start with a simple poc rake task. But ideally you'd want to add waka time to your Hours profile so it automatically syncs.

[jnillo]

Ok, I understood the direction of information was from Hours to Wakatimes and you said from waka to hours. Sound awesome for me!

[alexanderjeurissen]

only problem with services such as wakatime is that it's not really a good indicator of a programmers productivity. I've had days where I only edited code for 1/4th of the day, seeing as a lot of time goes to research, debugging in chrome etc.

We could also opt to look into integration with RescueTime as it also tracks time you spend on the web and other applications. I'm not sure if they have a good API though, and the service is paid only.

[jurre]

How would you expect the minutes > hours difference to work?

I'm not a huge fan of implementing this in Hours itself. Maybe we could expose an API and then services like Wakatime could use that?

[jurre]

Btw, I also think tools like WakaTime kind of go against the spirit of Hours. They focus on down to the minute time spent in your editor. I don't think this is interesting info for Hours, where we care approximately how much time spent doing a specific type of work.

I could spend an hour prototyping a feature where I spend maybe 15 minutes in my editor. What do I gain at the end of the month from seeing that I spent those 15 minutes in vim? Or even the combined time that I spent in vim doing Prototyping, Development, Design or DevOps? I don't see how it gives me more information that I'd need.

Tracking time like this seems like the type of thing they'd want me to do in some indian programming sweatshop (no offense whatsoever).

[alexanderjeurissen]

@jurre we could opt to either Ceil, or Floor based on a 30 min breaking period (1,5 hours becomes 2 and 1,3 becomes 1)

See my comment above, that were also my reservations, that time in editor is no good indication of programmers productivity.

and I didn't know you once worked in an indian programming sweatshop :stuck_out_tongue: ? xD

[fatboypunk]

I'm with @jurre on this, don't see it as something valuable to Hours

[jnillo]

Maybe Hours can add a tag (programming) automatically? But, the rounded is a problem :/ For the Indian too XD

[alexanderjeurissen]

Yeah now that I think of it, these kind off metrics are fun for personal use but don't provide much insight for a project, and if you want repository based info then Github already provide that.

this issue is also related: #188 so we should close that one as wel if we decide to not implement this feature.

[fatboypunk]

Gonna close this one for now :)