cui bono
What are they doing with my data?
WakaTime – Quantify your coding
11–20 of 21 posts
Re: WakaTime – Quantify your coding
#12I'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.
Re: WakaTime – Quantify your coding
#13Reminds 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]
Re: WakaTime – Quantify your coding
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: WakaTime – Quantify your coding
#15What questions can you answer with this data? Hours spent coding is a vanity metric, it doesn't offer actionable data.
Re: WakaTime – Quantify your coding
#16As 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.
Re: WakaTime – Quantify your coding
#17As 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.
The example JSON response from this api resource is a good overview of the metrics gathered:
Re: WakaTime – Quantify your coding
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: WakaTime – Quantify your coding
#19My 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.
Re: WakaTime – Quantify your coding
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.