Connecting a source

WakaTime

Coding time, measured by a plugin in your editor. There is no timer to start and none to forget to stop, which makes this the one source that keeps counting on the days you would not have remembered to.

New here? Toiling Away turns recorded time into animals that live in a habitat of your own.

You need the WakaTime plugin installed in the editor you actually work in. Install it first and write some code, or there will be nothing here for us to read.

Get an API key

  1. In WakaTime, open Settings, then Account, and find API Key. It is the same key your editor plugin uses, and it is shown whenever you ask rather than once.
  2. Copy it. Keys look like waka_ followed by a long string of letters, numbers and dashes.
  3. In Toiling Away, open Connections and add WakaTime. Nothing else to fill in.

What gets counted

Your own coding time, and only yours. The key says who you are, and we ask WakaTime for the current account rather than for a name typed into a form, so nobody can point this at a colleague.

Real hours, in the hours they happened. WakaTime hands back when each stretch of work started and how long it ran, so an hour coded at nine is credited at nine. If you also run a timesheet over the same hour, the two agree and it is paid for once.

An hour is ten toil, and what you were working on is not stored: no project name, no file, no language.

Working offline

The editor plugins keep your coding time on the machine when they cannot reach WakaTime, and send it the next time you open the editor with a connection. A laptop worked on all weekend on a train sends the weekend on Monday.

So we go back over the last three days on every look rather than only asking what is new, and a day that grows after the fact is topped up rather than counted twice. Longer than that, and the work will be in WakaTime but not here. If you have been off the network for a week, opening your editor online before the week is out is what keeps it.

A day means a WakaTime day. WakaTime tells us which timezone your account keeps and we count days in it, so the boundary is wherever your dashboard puts it.

If it stops working

The Connections screen shows the reason WakaTime gave. The usual cause is a key that has been reset, which retires the old one. Copy the new key from Settings, paste it in, and it carries on from where it stopped without re-crediting the days it has already counted.