ChronoDiff

The idea

The company I work for uses industrial hours to calculate working hours. Meaning that if you work for 6h45m, that equals 6,75h. If you're like me and always have to double-check everything, it can be quite time-consuming or just plain uncomfortable to always calculate whether the billed working hours are correct.

I wanted a simple CLI tool that would allow me to specify a start and end time. The tool then calculates the time worked in industrial hours—including break times.

I didn't find any such tools online, and if there were any I found them too bloated fo my use case. Hence, I build myself a simple cli tool that does that for me. Enter ChronoDiff.

The setup

I decided to learn something new in the process and since everyone was talking about Go at the time, I decided on that as the programming language.

Installing Go is as easy as following the official installation guide.

I also installed the go-pretty package to get some pretty tables as an output.

What it is now

To keep it simple, here is part of the ReadMe:

To use ChronoDiff, simply provide two timestamps as input. The tool will output the difference between them.

chronodiff --start "06:25" --end "15:13"

Output:

+---------------+---------+------------+
| #             |  NORMAL | INDUSTRIAL |
+---------------+---------+------------+
| Without break | 8h48m0s |        8.8 |
| With break    |  8h3m0s |       8.05 |
+---------------+---------+------------+

By default, Chronodiff defaults to a break time of 45 minutes. This can be changed by providing a different amount of minutes.

chronodiff --start "6:25" --end "15:13" --break 60

Output:

+---------------+---------+------------+
| #             |  NORMAL | INDUSTRIAL |
+---------------+---------+------------+
| Without break | 8h48m0s |        8.8 |
| With break    | 7h48m0s |        7.8 |
+---------------+---------+------------+