Time spent programming epiphanies

It’s more than just the commit count

I identify myself as a Junior Developer, who’s trying to settle in the community, work with people who have cracked the “code” before me, strive, persevere and get to where I want to be.

One of the most important things I do every single day is wake up and believe that I can do it. Another important thing, of course, is firing up my favorite editor and start programming my epiphanies.

My best friend’s best friend has a rule: She doesn’t count the number of places she has been to. Instead, she counts the number of hours she spends there.

When I asked her what the philosophy behind that was, she said,

60 seconds sound more than 1 minute.

We were kids, and I had no idea what meaning she was trying to project and so I shrugged and said “What rubbish, how many times did you fail at Math?”

All these things stay with you, and when you are ready, they hit you like a tracer bullet.

When I realised what she actually meant, I decided to make a tool for developers to note down how many hours/minutes/seconds they spent programming.

Introducing, CodeSpell

CodeSpell is a simple node.js CLI tool, that helps you “Record time spent programming epiphanies” which is just a fancy term I use to describe what I am doing with my life to my friends.

Once installed, which you can using npm or yarn(🎉), you can fire codespell in a terminal and see your intangible day come alive.

CodeSpell

In addition to showcasing a running timer for all your open editors, it gracefully outputs last day’s timespan as well. (It’s just JSON. You can read that yourself, right?)

It helps me gain confidence, because I may not get a purple patch on ten pull requests every week, but I definitely get to see ten hours I spent making a tool on Tuesday.

It’s on, yes, Github, and contributors and bug catchers are hereby solicited. codespell — Github 🎉

Note: Windows is not supported(well), yet! But it’s coming soon. Sooner than your order from Australia.