Simple Time Tracker

Demonstrating Useful Skills.

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Simple Time Tracker

A lightweight Python script for recording time spent working on projects. It is designed for a single user on a Linux system.

Motivation

I wanted to track how much time I spend working on projects. I probably could have used one of the more than 10,000 time tracker projects listed on PyPi, but I also needed a project to get me started using SQL again. Finally I wanted some example code that would be easy to download and run. Thus, Simple Time Tracker was born.

Lightweight Features

  • Single user.
  • Runs in a separate terminal while you work.
  • Doesn’t require any external libraries.
  • Uses a single database table.
  • Easily configured and managed using two simple JSON files.
  • Easy to install and run.
  • Thoroughly tested.

Key Design Principles

STT follows three key design principles that contributed a great deal to the success of this project:

  1. Separation of User Interface, Application, and Data layers
  2. Unit tests using the unittest module
  3. Simple configuration and administration

Separate Layers

  1. User Interface : sttuser.py
  2. Application: stt.py
  3. Data: sttdata.py

Even on a project as small as STT, this design principle really helped the development process, making it much easier to make changes and test one layer without affecting the others.

Unit Tests

Using unit tests from the outset had a great impact on the design of the code. I specifially designed each piece of code so that it could be automatically tested using the unittest module. This helped the development process and led to very clean and bug-free code.

Each module is tested separately and the application as a whole can be tested by passing test=True as a parameter to the startup code.

Simple Configuration

Two of my objectives for this project were to keep it simple and to get it up and running quickly. Towards those ends, I decided that, instead of a full relational database with foreign keys and referential integrity, I would use a single database table for the time records, and JSON files for projects and activities. The JSON files are simple and flexible, and can be modified in any editor. For a project like this, the ease of administration far outweighs any potential loss of data integrity. For more details, please see README.md on the main project page.

Easy to Install and Run

Simple Time Tracker is very easy to install and run. I encourage everyone to give it a try. You can download or clone the project from the Github Repository.

Reports

Creating reports from STT data is completely flexible and can be output in a variety of formats. No reports have been hard-coded into the program, but sample reports and the code to create them can be found in a Jupyter Notebook, which can be viewed in the repository or on Google Colab

Development Time

Application: 2022-02-11 - 2022-02-16: 6 days inclusive. Sample Reports: 2022-02-27: 1 day.