When I’m looking at when a merge request was merged in to master in gitlab, often the level of granularity I am interested in is ‘roughly how long ago’, or ‘what day in the last week was that?’ - the thing I am trying to figure out is just ‘did that go live last Tuesday or last Wednesday?’
I can recover that information from a date with a little mental arithmetic or a cross lookup to a calendar but it would be nice if the computer told me that.
On the other hand, sometimes when I am looking for when a git merge request was merged in I am looking for ‘was it a few minutes before or a few minutes after this error started happening in production?’ And the precise timestamp is of intense interest. At that point seeing a bunch of merge requests tagged as ‘last Tuesday’ is incredibly unhelpful to me. But so would just an unadorned date be.
In general I would lean towards providing the information in a raw form but also contextualized.
But ‘just a date’ is often the worst of both worlds. Even worse if I don’t know which time zone the date is being reported relative to (people often display UTC dates without clarifying that, or even considering that dates need time zone adjusting too).
My dream contextualized timestamp would be something like
When I’m looking at when a merge request was merged in to master in gitlab, often the level of granularity I am interested in is ‘roughly how long ago’, or ‘what day in the last week was that?’ - the thing I am trying to figure out is just ‘did that go live last Tuesday or last Wednesday?’
I can recover that information from a date with a little mental arithmetic or a cross lookup to a calendar but it would be nice if the computer told me that.
On the other hand, sometimes when I am looking for when a git merge request was merged in I am looking for ‘was it a few minutes before or a few minutes after this error started happening in production?’ And the precise timestamp is of intense interest. At that point seeing a bunch of merge requests tagged as ‘last Tuesday’ is incredibly unhelpful to me. But so would just an unadorned date be.
In general I would lean towards providing the information in a raw form but also contextualized.
But ‘just a date’ is often the worst of both worlds. Even worse if I don’t know which time zone the date is being reported relative to (people often display UTC dates without clarifying that, or even considering that dates need time zone adjusting too).
My dream contextualized timestamp would be something like