

WakaTime – Quantify your coding - mhaehnel
https://wakatime.com/

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ricklancee
I don't see the point of this other than the "cool i spend 50% more time in
[insert language here] than [insert language here]" factor.

Also:
[http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html](http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html)

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mhaehnel
For me, it's a tool to track my time i'm spending on which projects.

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ricklancee
How do you track time that you spend on the project that is not done inside
the editor; for example research?

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xasos
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.

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exclusiv
I use rescuetime to track browser page titles. I use wakatime for tracking
too.

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mikekchar
As 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.

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ekims
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.

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techiferous
> 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.

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tttbbb
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.

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heldrida
I'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.

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philipmjohnson
My 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](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.

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nileshtrivedi
What I'd like to see is a tool that relates commits to bugs and feature which
could have a dollar value assigned, therefore making it possible to capture
value created in a given day/week/month.

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thomersch_
Reminds me of [http://codeivate.com](http://codeivate.com), I really like it
although it has some rough edges

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felipesabino
unfortunately codeivate lost me when I switched to Atom.io... the plugin is on
a queue for more than a year :( [1]

[1] [http://codeivate.userecho.com/topic/417377-atom-
plugin/](http://codeivate.userecho.com/topic/417377-atom-plugin/)

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barryosull
What questions can you answer with this data? Hours spent coding is a vanity
metric, it doesn't offer actionable data.

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sergiotapia
cui bono

What are they doing with my data?

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lowglow
Alan Hamlett is awesome and I wish that team all the best!

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kyriakos
Used wakatime via phpstorm. Interesting product.

