WakaTime – Quantify your coding | Hacker News Reader

WakaTime – Quantify your coding

wakatime.com

47 pointsmhaehnel20 comments

I don't see the point of this other than the "cool i spend 50% more time in [insert language here] than [insert language here]" factor.

Also: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html

For me, it's a tool to track my time i'm spending on which projects.

How do you track time that you spend on the project that is not done inside the editor; for example research?

Exactly my thoughts. Many projects are more about the research, and less about the time purely spent coding. Many times, my research time > coding time, so it would be cool if WakaTime made a Chrome plugin that could track that time.

I use rescuetime to track browser page titles. I use wakatime for tracking too.

I use emacs and one org mode file per project so it tracks kind of well as long as my research produces notes.

As a proper Emacs user I also do my e-mailing there and my e-mail is in a git repository. Whenever I feel like I haven't got much done in a day I can usually verify that I it was because I spend like half a day writing e-mails instead of coding.

One of the more surprising stats I have found out about myself is that I regulary spend about 5% project time writing git commit messages.

I actually find the most value of wakatime that I can keep track of that I don't work too much on the "wrong" projects. Wakatime has helped me hold off things I should not focus on that much.

Wakatime has at least somewhat reduced my imposter syndrome tendencies because I can use it to disprove the feeling that I'm not getting things done because it tells me that I got things done even if it was not the things I originally had plan to get done.

As far as I can tell it measures the number of hours one has spent coding using each language. Does it measure anything else?

I went to the site hoping that it would explain what metrics it is gathering and why those metrics might be useful. It might just be me, but I couldn't find that information.

It also measures the time spent in a git repository. The free version sends you a weekly email with the breakdowns. I've used it for over a year now, really happy with it.

You can also compare yourself to other developers, aka a leaderboard.

> You can also compare yourself to other developers, aka a leaderboard.

That's a feature with negative value. Top developers, at least in a business context, are those that help business realize their goals for their web product. One way top developers do this is to find solutions that involve writing less code, since code is a liability.

I found it useful when I saw myself on the top of the list some months ago and decided to take some days of because I was working way too much.

The example JSON response from this api resource is a good overview of the metrics gathered:

https://wakatime.com/developers/#stats

I'm now using this to know in which projects I've worked during the week. I think it's quite expensive for what it is.

My research group investigated this approach to software metrics collection and analysis for about 10 years with an open source project called "Hackystat". We wrote around 50 papers and there was a startup based on our approach (that was later aquihired.) You can find a list of papers we wrote here:

http://www.citeulike.org/group/3370/tag/hackystat

The first one, "Searching under the streetlight for useful software metrics" is our attempt to summarize the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.

There are significant challenges associated with making this kind of data actionable, and significant political/social issues associated with collecting this data at all.

What I'd like to see is a tool that relates commits to bugs and feature which could have a dollar value assigned, therefore making it possible to capture value created in a given day/week/month.

Reminds me of http://codeivate.com, I really like it although it has some rough edges

unfortunately codeivate lost me when I switched to Atom.io... the plugin is on a queue for more than a year :( [1]

[1] http://codeivate.userecho.com/topic/417377-atom-plugin/

What questions can you answer with this data? Hours spent coding is a vanity metric, it doesn't offer actionable data.

cui bono

What are they doing with my data?

Alan Hamlett is awesome and I wish that team all the best!

Used wakatime via phpstorm. Interesting product.

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