Manji VS timer-5

A hacker news client I made: https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki

Also a kanji learning app if anybody is interested: https://github.com/Livinglist/Manji

depends on what kinda specialization you are interested in, at least for me it’s mobile app development. I have been making apps since college, I was interested in Japanese language so I made a kanji learning app [0], then because I’m a bodybuilder, I made a workout log app [1], recently because I started reading hacker news, I made a Hacker News reader [2]. I learnt a lot from the process, from architecture, design pattern to code quality control. I would say learning is the key, usefulness is secondary.

[0] https://github.com/Livinglist/Manji

I wrote a app for learning Japanese kanji when I was in college learning Flutter, I didn’t have any experience working on real world projects and barely have any knowledge of design pattern, architecture, clean code etc… I was young and naive, but had passion, so I started collecting data using scrappers I wrote in Python, organized them into a SQLite database, put a lot of example sentences and vocabulary on Firebase, then made an app using Flutter. I gradually added more features into the app after I released the first version, things like handwritten kanji recognition using Tensorflow lite and image text extraction using Google OCR api… I learned a lot, and by a lot, I mean a lot lot of stuff from making this app. The app is functioning just fine but the code is ugly as hell…for example attributes in data model classes are not final, doesn’t support dependency injection, etc….

After I started working, I learned a lot about how to write clean code and I always wanted to refactor/rewrite the whole app which gonna take a lot of effort and time of course. But every time I sat down, opened the old codebase, I hesitated, thought about it and told myself that it wasn’t worth it then continued my life.

do you have any personal project you always wanted to refactor/rewrite but still haven’t done or probably never will do so?

if you are interested, you can come see and compare the code of the kanji app and a new app I wrote recently:

https://github.com/Livinglist/Manji

Same here, I used to develop apps for Windows Phone back in 2014... then after I got into college, there was UWP, I made Japanese dictionary using it: [Kanjirin](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/kanjirin/9pfwxjr41x4d?activetab=pivot:overviewtab), then I started learning Flutter, Dart was really easy to pick up, syntax is quite similar to C#, and I think what you need to practice on is state management and learn about widgets and useful thrid party packages. I made many mistakes when I was making my first flutter app - [Manji](https://github.com/Livinglist/Manji), but at least it got me my first Flutter related job. Here is my latest app using best practices if you are interested: [Hacki - Hacker News reader](https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki)

I maintain two Angular applications which leverage Angular Material and where dependencies are usually kept up to date.

The first one is my tiny pet project - https://github.com/Klaster1/timer-5 - that I use daily. Updating to MDC components was straightforward and style changes did not cause much trouble.

The second one is a moderately-sized enterprise app I work on as an employee. Every single component update introduces visual regressions the team had to coordinates the fixes for with the UI designer. We split the workload by similar component types, largest pain points being buttons and form controls. Total estimates are in 30-50 hours range, we plan to chip at the task bit by bit until Angular Material 17 arrives, where the legacy component are to be removed.

On a side note, migrating to Ivy-enabled dependencies was on even larger time scale as dependencies had their own breaking changes we spent a ton of effort on, especially Chart.js 2->3 and ag-grid 26->29.

I really enjoy time tracking threads on HN, the domain is straightforward enough for every time there to be an absolutely different set off tools and approaches, without major incumbents dominating the field. The discussions always inspire me to think about my time tracking tool - https://github.com/Klaster1/timer-5 - in a different light and seek inspiration from others.

Several of my projects brought me to similar thoughts. I decided to spend my time on something else unless I use the project in question often and it would really benefit from an occasional refactoring and update. Right now, I've only got a single such project (https://github.com/Klaster1/timer-5), the readme links to several previous iterations. During rewrites, I focused on learning new techniques and tools, but surprisingly, a select few places remained relatively stable throughout the years - either I didn't learn anything new in the area or got it pretty good the first time.

The article resonated with my experience as as software developer.

At my first place, a small outsourcing shop, employees were required to log daily activities so hours per day roughly fit to 8 and 40 per week. From the beginning and unlike most of collectors, I measured my time precisely with https://github.com/Klaster1/timer-5 and soon understood that doing 8 hours per day doesn't happen much and often involves staying late, so instead I simply adjusted the reported numbers to look plausible. In four years, I only received positive feedback on my productivity. What was the management thinking, I have no idea, just like the article says, this was a farce all around.

When I changed the company, the habit to measure productivity stuck. Nowadays, I start working somewhere at 9 and finish at 18, and result is still the same - honest 8 hours of work activity pretty day happen at best once a month, the average week sums to 30-34 hours. Code-related activities never take more than 3-4 hours per day, that includes both coding and reviews. I get the impression that some of my colleagues might spend more time on the job, but low productivity was never a topic of my performance reviews, management seems content with what they get.

Combining a timer wither a calendar sounds like an interesting idea! For almost ten years, I've been using my own app for a similar purpose (tracking work productivity and video games), basically a to do list with timer, plus basic filtration to analyze the data. The app is here: https://github.com/Klaster1/timer-5 .