A project to help me count down to important dates. Built with TypeScript and Sass.

I’m bad at remembering dates, and even worse at calculating how far away they are. This project outsources that task to something more reliable.

I am useless at dates. Without my calendar I’d never remember everywhere I have to be or at what time. Sometimes, it is useful to know how long it is until a specific date and time. For example a holiday abroad, or the release of a new game. Something to look at to help build up the hype!

That is where the inspiration for this project came from. “How hard could it be?” I thought.

As with all projects, I had a couple of broad goals:

• it needed to be aesthetic
• easily shareable
• have the ability to easily add/remove timers
• confetti 🎉

I decided against using any kind of front-end framework, as the scope of the project is fairly small. Besides, sometimes it’s just nice to do something vanilla. The business logic of the project means it can all be done front-end, and requires no back-end infrastructure.

Custom Timers

The original version of the project only supported hardcoded dates. After a while it got annoying to have to redeploy the application every time I wanted a new timer. I explored a couple of ways around that, eventually settling on handling timer data encoded in the URL. This has multiple benefits:

• ability to add timers at will without redeploying
• anyone could add timers they desire (once I’ve built the UI to allow it, coming soon!)
• it is privacy respecting, as you’d need to know the URL in order to see the timer

But it also has a couple of drawbacks:

• not able to revoke a timer once it has been shared
• could potentially hit URL length limits with large text fields
• long/ugly URLs

For now, I think this works well. In order to build it out so that anybody can add a timer, I might have to look at creating a microservice to handle them. This would eliminate most of the drawbacks listed above.

Future

Here is a brain-dump of all the features/changes I’d like to make to the application in the future:

• ability to add custom timers
• show how long it has been since the timer completed
• add UI to allow anybody to generate a valid timer
• button to stop the confetti
• be able to “save” private timers, so you don’t have to remember the magic URL
• offer different ways of counting down