Supposedly a Geek: 06/01/2013

This was originally published on June 17th, 2013

At our company, Yubb Software (now zla.bs), we track our working hours using the great time tracker created by the folks at Toggl, and we have monthly goals that we need to achieve. I have always had a problem with time management, and this time I decided I should start working on them.

So I created this small project to calculate how many more hours I should work to achieve my monthly goals.

This is how the output of this script looks like :

Hi
Checking Internet connectivity...
Internet seems fine!

Trying to connect to Toggl, hang on!

So far you have tracked 120.00 hours

Business days left till deadline : 7
Total days left till deadline : 10

Required working hours for this month : 170

To achieve the minimum :
    you should log 4.00 hours every business day
    or log 3.00 hours every day

To achieve the required :
    you should log 7.00 hours every business day
    or log 5.0 hours every day

So far you have achieved:

70.59% [================================================----------|-----]

This information has provided me with a whole new level of awareness of how productive I am! It is scary, but at the same time it gives you a great indicator of how good -or bad- you are sticking to your goals and if you need to have some crunch time or just relax the next weekend.

I then published the script under GPL license V2 on Github.

I got great deal of help from one of my role model software engineers in Egypt, Mohammed Tayseer, making the code more Pythonic. He also added installation instructions for Windows users, as I don’t use windows anymore, and he is now a contributor to the repository on Github.

Today, Monday June 17th, Toggl added a link to my script on their new documentation in the Code Examples section.

My little open source script that uses is the first -and so far the only- mentioned project in their new API Documentation. Check it on their API Documenation on Github.

This really made my day. Thank you Toggl :)

Update 1 : Friday June 21st, 3:50 PM

I received an email today from someone with the following content :

Hi Mosab,

I’m currently making a small Python app that interacts with the toggl API, and your toggl target script has been helpful in getting me started. I’m using a modified version of your api.py file, and I’d like to credit you in my project when I put it on GitHub, but I’m not sure how (I’m rather new to all of this). Is it sufficient to mention that in the readme or should I leave the line “#@author Mosab Ahmad mosab.ahmad@gmail.com” at the beginning of the file?

If you’re interested, it’s an implementation of this (percentile feedback)

Best

I am really glad my code helped someone :)

Update 2 : Wednesday Jul 10th, 11:43 PM

Seems that my little Toggl Target script is picking up some momentum.

I got this email 45 minutes ago :

hi,

you probably have already seen it, but i forked your toggl_target repo.

i just wanted to see how fast i could add reports api support and what data comes out of there… while doing that i replaced the way the config is loaded to something similar like django works and loading a config file directly from a user’s home dir… and added a setup.py to install everything.

so now there is a separate script to get some reports and an api wrapper for reports subclassing yours. i also did a little refactoring in your code.

since you seem to plan on writing a separate pytoggle lib i thought some of that is useful for you… so i wanted to give you an overview of what i changed and let you know, i probably won’t do anything more with that.