Worklog

The documentation, including this readme, is hosted on Github Pages.

Worklog is a command line interface (CLI) to track your achievements right from your terminal. I created this application initially for myself to have a permanent record on my local computer for performance reviews. Often times, those reviews ask me to summarize my achievements over the past 6-12 months and I realized it’s very easy to forget something. Not everything I do has a ticket assigned to it. I don’t write down every interaction or time that I help out others on the team or outside. Using this CLI allows me to keep track of minor and major work items and interactions so that I am prepared when performance reviews are due.

The app has been created with the following design principles in mind:

  • Use only human-readable files to store information. This prevents vendor lock in and allows everybody to take their files with them at any time. It also makes it very clear what data is stored

  • Prioritize privacy by keeping all data local and not enabling any telemetry

  • Use reasonable defaults. The application should work for the user, not the other way around

  • High unit test coverage, with the goal of 100%.

Worklog is currently (early/mid 2025) in active development. The main functionality is implemented and works reliably. I am using the app multiple times per day.

Features

An (incomplete) list of the currently available features.

  • Track line items of work and add urls, ticket ids, tags, people, milestones (epics)

  • Show past entries with multiple filters

  • Show interactions with people

  • Show statistics

  • Show log as website, including a mode for presentation well suited for screen sharing

Installation

The most straightforward way to install this CLI is to use Rubygems.

gem install fewald-worklog

This installs the worklog globally and adds the CLI as wl. Refer to the section “usage” on how to use the CLI or run wl help.

Usage

To add an entry with todays date and the current time, run the following command:

wl add "This is an example" --tags tag1,tag2,tag3 --epic --url "http://example.com" --ticket WL-123

Then verify that it is saved by printing all logs from the current day:

wl show

To show all the people you interacted with, type:

wl people

Run a basic webserver on port 9292 via:

wl serve

Show all used tags:

wl tags

Create an AI summary (experimental). Requires Ollama with llama3.2:

wl summary

wl help [subcommand]

Development

Clone the application from Github in a convenient location:

git clone git@github.com:f-ewald/worklog.git

Install the application by running the following command from the root directory. This requires the Ruby version defined in the .tool-versions file (for ASDF) and referenced in the Gemfile.lock.

bundle install