Scratching My Own Itch
I have been procrastinating a lot, which is usual for me. So much of my inaction when it comes to my coding journey comes from my need to think through every scenario. Everything has to line up perfectly before I make a start. This is a recipe for disaster.
However, I recently shipped something despite my tendency to procrastinate. It's a very simple calculator that does one thing: It takes a start time, an end time, and then it spits out the amount of time between the two in decimal hours.
While creating this, I made a conscious effort not to copy and paste code from my trusty LLM friend, Claude. Instead, I leaned heavily on bouncing ideas off the AI with explicit instructions not to generate the code for me. The result: A fully functioning calculator that handles overnight cases like working overnight, with the majority of the logic written by myself. It's a proud moment for me.
I have gone for a minimal design because the vast majority of the calculators I use on the internet are bloated and look ugly.
If you've made it this far, you're probably wondering why I created this particular calculator. Well, my wife sometimes does exam marking/grading for the State that we live in. As part of the payment process, she has to submit a timesheet in decimal hours. Being a lover of spreadsheets, I set to work. It was straightforward to build a spreadsheet that could handle the task, but it struck me that this might be a good little coding project. I could create something permanent that she, and more importantly, the whole world could use if they wanted to.
This is the first thing I've shipped that genuinely scratched an itch that I had. At the moment, functionality is basic, but I have some ideas on features I want to add, such as:
- A 'timesheet mode' toggle
- In timesheet mode, the user will be able to add a date to their times and save their files to an HTML table
- My plan would be to use
localStorageso users can save their timesheets
This feature will give me exposure to concepts I haven't yet worked with like HTML tables and localStorage in JavaScript. It'll be a gradual increase in difficulty, but nothing insurmountable.
Oh, the site is called Time To Decimal, and you can find it here.
This post (Scratching My Own Itch) was last edited 9 months, 1 week ago.