I’ve been coding with PHP for a long, long time and over that time lots and lots of that work has been leveraging form buildings and table builders to make powerful and useful (though often dull looking) forms. There’s so many different relations that you can need to represent on a form, and so many different validation rules that you need to capture. And then there’s the mix between frontend permissions, backend permission, and javascript and all the rest of it.

We use timers everywhere, and most of the time how they work is fine. But I’ve come across a slightly different need. For those who struggle with working, and procrastinate, there is the “Pomodoro” technique which advises on setting a timer for 20 mins and commiting to focusing on work throughout that 20 mins before stopping for a break. I like this and have used it a couple of times to just get going on a project, but this use case actually means a normal timer is often not quite the right thing.