start123

Post Covid - back in 2023 - when my company went full time remote, I wanted to track the number of hours I worked everyday.

Having worked full time in office before, the guilt of not spending enough hours bothered me. After looking for simple time tracking solutions, I failed to find a decent one that wasn't bloated with bells and whistles.

So, I built one over the weekend, bought the domain and used it for a few weeks.

I also showcased here "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38857075" and in one of the productivity subreddits on Reddit.

Eventually, I stopped using it and the domain expired after a year.

Totally forgot about it.

2 weeks ago, out of nowhere, a user on Reddit messaged me this:

"Hey, dude, hope you're doing well.

Just wanted to say TMG was absolutely amazing but I was sad to see it no longer works. Any plans to bring it back?

Cheers"

I was surprised that at least one other person was actively using it, and was impacted by its shutdown.

I quickly opened my laptop, and purchased the domain again on "Friday 22nd of August 2025" to be precise.

I reinstated the simple utility tool, and then for past few days, polished it, add few more features and here I am now, writing about it.

I don't know if something will happen to it, but I promise to keep it running for a long long time.

The Reddit user hasn't responded to my reply yet, I hope he does some day, and will be happy that its back online.

Here is the link to the time tracking tool https://www.timemygrind.com if you are curious.

Is there another way to check the capability of a software engineer than ask him/her to solve traditional algorithms and data structure questions?

I have seen a few websites that showcase design and architecture using animated gifs.

Here is one example(1st image in the link) https://www.confluent.io/blog/confluent-developer-launches-free-apache-kafka-courses-and-tutorials-online/

How can I make one of these where you can visualize packets of data flowing?

To give some context, I have been running a URL shortener[1] and all of my customers use custom domains to create short links.

Today, I got curious and decided to dig a bit deeper into my database.

Here's what I found about Browser share.

Safari - 54.3% Chrome - 32.6% Firefox - 3.5% SamsungBrowser - 3.3% Edge - 1% Opera - 0.4% MiuiBrowser - 0.2% Others = 4.7%

I am quite surprised that Safari has the largest share. Is this due to popularity of iphone and Mac? TBH, I expected Chrome to win this battle with Firefox coming close second.

The data is from User agent, so there is a possibility of minor errors. Also, most of the data is from the US.

[1] https://blanq.io