Activity Tracker - Level1Techs Devember project

Devember is an event organized by the Level1Techs youtube channel, where they invite members of their community to spend some time in the winter months to working on a side project and to document their progress and share their results with the rest of the community.

The most interesting projects receive prizes from the Level1Techs team.

My project

My goal was to build a webapp with a simple interface where I could define time based goals and various related clockable activities, and then to clock-in and out of them. I was hoping end up with a tool which would help me reinforce my habits and give me a better understanding of how I spend my time.

I wanted to build something for myself, something which would be useful in my everyday life.

I wrote about the goals in more details in the introductory post in the level1forum thread.

On the technical side of things, I wanted to learn Clojure and experiment with the htmx library for frontend interactivity. Again, more details and rationale in the introductory post.

I ended up submitting weekly updates from October 21st until January 2nd, with a special retrospective post on January 4th and final followup to open discussions on February 22nd.

Conclusion

I gave my conclusions about how the project went in my retrospective post, so I won't repeat all of it here. Just to summarize a few points:

• Giving weekly status updates helped keep me on track, the flow reminded me of something like SCRUM for defining goals and reviewing them at the end of each cycle.
• Clojure + htmx were a pretty good fit for the project, although I think the clojure code ended up a bit more complicated than it needed to be because I wanted to experiment with various language features.

Most importantly: It's been fun, and I learned a lot.

I got a shoutout in the finalists video and a special mention of the quality of my documentation in the finalists thread on the forum which is very gratifying because I put a lot of effort into documenting my progress.

Wendell ended up sending me a couple hundred dollars worth of linode tokens as a prize, for which I'm super grateful.

The code is available on my gitlab: msladecek/activity-tracker. I still occasionally push small changes there because I use the tool every day.