You're being paid by the hour, but do you really want to worry about logging your hours? If you're using Git, isn't that already being done for you? Clockout is a tool that analyzes a Git repo and converts your commits into blocks of time worked.
Clockout determines how long each commit took by taking the time interval since the previous one, if it's close enough. With everything added up, Clockout can print out pretty (as far as CLI graphics go) charts and tables to show your boss, and your Git history is the evidence to back it up.
Install:
$ [sudo] gem install clockout
Display hours worked:
$ cd path/to/git/repo
$ clock
Options:
--estimations, -e: Show estimations made, if any
--condensed, -c: Condense output (don't show the timeline for each day)
--user, -u (<email>): Only count current user's commits (or a given user, if specified)
--help, -h: Show this message
Generators:
$ clock generate config Generate config file (clock.yml)
$ clock generate hook Generate a post-commit hook for clockout
What about the first commit in a time block? Say I wake up, work an hour on a feature, and commit it. If there was no previous commit that day to use as a reference point, how will that time be logged?
Clockout will estimate a time for a pioneer commit based on the size of its diff, using the diffs-per-hour rate on your other commits.
But sometimes these estimations can be misleading. (Say you've added third-party libraries to your code, which Git says is a lot of additions.) Just add a configuration file to the root of your repo to customize a range of options and make your hours estimations more accurate. Run the following from your repo to generate a template config file:
$ clock generate config
Or, if you're dedicated, Clockout can be a lot more powerful. Right before working, simply run,
$ clock in
from your repo's directory. The current time will be logged in clock.yml, and the time for your next commit will be calculated from the clock-in time to the time that you git commit. Nothing more.
Let's say you've committed a feature and you're now spending time doing QA, writing emails, or any work outside of Git. How can you log those additional hours?
$ clock out
They work nicely together too, if you're working without committing anything. Also, both of these accept an optional argument that offsets the clock time, in minutes (ie, if you forgot to clock in 10 minutes ago, you can do clock in -10 instead.)
This is just for fun.
$ clock generate hook
This generates a post-commit hook for your repo that, on commit, will print out the time it took for that commit!
So now your commits will look something like this:
~/projects/github/clockout $ git commit -m"Add post-commit hook generator"
[clockout] 24.27 minutes logged
[master 9a806a6] Add post-commit hook generator
4 files changed, 50 insertions(+), 27 deletions(-)
rewrite clockout-0.5.gem (71%)
brew install cmake
bundle