Klog retrospective: One year into my open-source time tracking project | Hacker News Reader

Klog retrospective: One year into my open-source time tracking project

jotaen.net

34 pointsjotaen12 comments

Just for reference, this was the discussion of the “Show HN” post from February, when I initially published the project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25995838

I agree with the author that it's hard to generalize use-cases, and make it easy to use. It looks like a really nice solution for solo tracking.

I freelanced a few years and now work in a small consulting/hosting co-op. We have to manage time for dozens of active projects. When it's time to invoice clients, I often end up doing small tweaks on my time-tracker. It used to take me 30 minutes to generate/send an invoice. When I had 2 clients, quarterly invoicing, that was fine. These days I generate around 20 invoices per quarter, 5-10 minutes per onvoice. It includes emailing the client and including a time sheet.

Besides reinventing the wheel (well, partially, because it uses our CRM product), I find it really useful to support Gitlab and Matternost webhooks. I can do "/spend 1h" on the client's issue, and it adds the time in the right project. Similarly I can do "/punch 10:00+1h acme/support [comment]" on mattermost, and it will do the same.

It's overkill for most, but I think good time tracking and invoicing are similar to having a good dev setup. You'll save time and avoid frustration down the road. Freelancer and consulting shops often need to track all those small 15 mins calls and emails, which add up, and sometimes a client will ask where that time went, so it's important to have good reports.

> I think good time tracking and invoicing are similar to having a good dev setup.

I agree and found that to be especially true with freelancing, since the work time is the effectively basis for the invoice.

One hint for those curious: klog isn’t capable of generating reports (as in a HTML or PDF). But there is the `klog json` subcommand that enables people to create their own, much like in the spirit of what was recently discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29435786

Thanks for sharing this! I've been struggling with time tracking, I use a phone app but it doesn't really fit my habits anymore, especially now that I'm doing work on desktop and not mobile. This looks like exactly what I'm looking for!

If you are looking for a simple time tracking app for Windows you are welcome to try CCTime: https://github.com/rlv-dan/CCTime

I'm enjoying Hamster for time tracking, especially that they have several different types of interfaces.

https://github.com/projecthamster

Thanks for that link, I didn’t know Hamster yet. I agree, having a UI (at least optionally) is a big plus.

Comparison with TimeWarrior? It seems to satisfy all of your constraints.

https://timewarrior.net/

Timewarrior uses a custom data format, but I don’t think it’s meant to be read or manipulated by hand. You technically can, but you’d need to spell out full UTC timestamps, for example.

It’s a great tool in general, though.

I see, thank you for the explanation.

I like the simplicity of it. And set up my own file just to do some testing. Will try to use it and see how it goes!

This is why Hackers/Freelancers are so hard to please. I made ZimTik for almost all of the reasons this guy mentions. I just wanted something as simple as a spreadsheet that automatically takes care of as much as possible (invoices, taxes, expenses, etc). But we don't expose everything as txt files. But that's something I'll have to consider I guess :)

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