Logging time, part 1: github for timelogging¶

Tags: django, nelenschuurmans

I’ve got to keep track of what I work on. The company I work for (Nelen & Schuurmans) is pretty much focused on projects, so that’s what you should book your hours on. This is both for billing to clients and for internal bookkeeping: projects should be profitable, ideally, so we need to keep track of it.

Now… how to do this? I fill in my hours two or three times during the month. And my memory isn’t that good that I remember everything. So I look in my agenda for free days, meetings, that sort of stuff. But the majority of my work isn’t in my agenda, it is in code.

And the code… is in github, mostly. So what I do when filling in my hours is looking at the github timeline. See https://github.com/reinout, at the bottom is my contribution activity. That tells me enough on what I did in the last week.

A different view is gitspective, see for instance my timeline. It gives you a different timeline, better for filling in your hours than github’s. Apart from one detail: it misses the private repositories you worked on. And our Django sites are all private because of some database passwords and customer data that can be in them…

Anyway: if you’re a coder, github can help you fill in your hours.