Show HN: An open source alternative to Wakatime

Show HN: An open source alternative to Wakatime wakana.io...

I built an open source alternative to wakatime because I don't think a wakatime premium should cost more than a Github copilot subscription. The problem wakatime solves is rather straightforward. Their hardest bit of business is creating all those plugins, besides that the backend just ingests plugin data and organizes it into a dashboard that gives insights into developer work habits.

I also felt features like goals, invoices and management of clients shouldn't require premium subscription. And for the most part, I feel I'm right. Especially after implementing these features.

The website is now in beta testing and I'd love your feedback on some of the metrics you'd like to see that are not currently on the wakatime website.

I've already added stats about the amount of coding time spent writing code. And for me it feels like a big deal thus far.

I've also been playing with an idea of showing developer focus/attention as buckets of heartbeats over time or heartbeat frequency over time.

I feel there is more. Looking forward to hearing your feedback

WakaTime offers business/enterprise licensing, where self-improvement/introspection suddenly looks exactly like corporate task management, employee surveillance, and performance metrics.

So, "leaderboard" (fun!) becomes "stack-ranking" (vicious!).

How do you see Wakana positioned and used, in practice?

* Will it be used by the individual for self-improvement and time management?

* Will metrics-crazed companies use it to whip-crack employees?

* Will even a non-corporate leaderboard/ranking be twisted and gamed for self-promotion?

jemiluv8 · 5 months ago

I share your sentiments as a developer. That was one of my motivations for starting work on this. I wanted developers to decide and develop some of these metrics. I am not sure how exactly that looks like and I am hoping open source will help in figuring that out. In the meantime please check the faq. Developer productivity is not something that can be measured with simple metrics like time spent coding.

jemiluv8 · 5 months ago

> Will it be used by the individual for self-improvement and time management?

At the moment my only goal is for the developer to use it to track and observe work habits. All else is not really applicable at the moment.

xnx · 5 months ago

Hoping someone can change the title to something like "Shown HN: Wakana - Open source wakatime alternative"

This is embarrassing. At the time I was making the post, HN kept rejecting it and the title became shorter and shorter with every try. I am trying to edit the title now without much success. Thanks for the suggestion. It would’ve helped people know what it was about better than the current title

spacechild1 · 5 months ago

The missing title happens to be quite effective click bait, so I would keep it :)

neilv · 5 months ago

rustc · 5 months ago

So this uses https://github.com/wakatime/wakatime-cli under the hood. Is there any way to make wakatime-cli store all data locally in a file (like sqlite or csv)?

airstrike · 5 months ago

Home page says:

> Copy and paste this into your ~/.wakatime.cfg file

    [settings]
    api_url = https://api.wakana.io/api
    api_key = ## replace this with your api key when you login

From the FAQ:

> This is a self-hosted version of wakatime.com that is open source and free to use. We rely on the same open source plugins and collect the same data that is available from wakatime's open source plugins.

Naturally this being FOSS, I see from the README on github that you have a choice to self-host, so maybe that ought to be front and center on the home page? Actually the README has a ton of content that could be on the site

I agree. There is a lot that is not on the homepage. I’d welcome any contributions. I barely managed to put together a decent homepage.

j1elo · 5 months ago

The Docker instructions at https://github.com/jemiluv8/wakana point to using this image:

  ghcr.io/muety/wakapi:latest

Seems that "muety/wakapi" is the source project from which this one was forked, so, is that Docker image just an artifact of forking the README and forgetting to update it?

Yup. My bad. My fork needs lots of readme and other updates

Deleted Comment

Diti · 5 months ago

Why does such a tool need an API and an external connection? I use `arbtt`, which is local-only.

echoangle · 5 months ago

> Why does such a tool need an API and an external connection?

So time spent on different devices can be tracked under a single user account, I guess.

Klaster_1 · 5 months ago

This problem exists indeed and I encounter it from time to time when I switch between desktop and laptop. My time tracking tool [0] is local-only and I still didn't come up with a solution that lets it remain so and a PWA at the same time. Solutions that allow you to sync data without a dedicated server (as in running specifically for your app needs) range from trivial ones like storing the data in a Google Drive all the way to P2P.

[0] https://github.com/Klaster1/timer-5