Saturday, August 16

Getting into Grails

For months now I've been wanting to do a simple project to develop a more in-depth knowledge of Grails, but have never been able to make the time to do it. Now I'm starting on a small time-keeping application that will help me analyze and(hopefully) identify areas of waste.

Everyone has their own ideas/preferences about time keeping. Some like to set up all their tasks before hand and apply time in a very structured, hierarchical manner. Some like to keep a simple log of what they have been working on and the time. Then consider all the thousands of permutations in-between and it's easy to see why a time-keeping application that suits everyone is nearly impossible.

I have two guiding prinicples for timekeeping, it should be unintrusive and as accurate as possible. Accuracy is great, but do you really need to know down to the minute? I would rather be able to log things as I go and organize them at another time.

I also like timekeeping systems that ask what you have been doing, not what you are about to do. That's just a matter of simple experience in the reality that one may think they know the next task, but other people have different ideas. Between ringing phones and requests for help/code reviews/etc, the culture I work in doesn't typically allow someone to work on one thing for a block of time with no distractions.

So I saw this as a perfect opportunity for me to develop a timekeeping system that works like I do. In all honesty, the credit for the idea goes to the gtimelog project as it was my introduction to keeping time in this manner. Why not contribute to gtimelog? Well, the goal of my project was to learn Grails, not contribute to an open source project. So while that may be a future consideration, right now it's my own little playground.

More to come soon.