The final countdown

Coming to the end of my full-time job at the end of 2012 was a sad but exciting time. It was the end of an era for me, and I was very sorry not to be working with some great people any more, but was also excited about what lay ahead.

Working on a contract basis I now often have the same feeling, but in more regular bursts. As much as I may have enjoyed a particular project of working with a certain company, moving on always marks the start of something exciting for me, and is something that I really enjoy. There’s lots to look forward to at the end – I might have a holiday before I start another long stint, I can meet new people and learn new things, pick up new ways of working, or most importantly be able to find and sample previously unknown lunch spots.

So back to 2012. To monitor my ever-approaching transition date I created a little Chrome extension called The Final Countdown. Yes, my pointless creations have no limits. At the time it was a messy little thing, containing an mp3 of its namesake song, an embedded video of the He-Man Heyayayayay video, and crucially a breakdown of days left until my leaving date. At the time I was splitting my week between home and the office, so I had a count of the calendar days, working days, and days in the office.

As part of my recent drive to finish off things I once started, I recently resurrected it, refreshed a couple of the assets, and updated the dates. As I’m currently based mainly in an office rather than the other way around I changed it to instead have calendar days, working days, and ‘bastard London commuting days’. It now sits nicely (as much as a poorly designed pointless widget can) in my browser at work, although I’d be able to port it to a quick one-pager, or even a PhoneGap build incredibly easily as it’s just HTML/CSS/JS.

Code plus instructions on GitHub for anyone with deadline-plus-motivating-soundtrack needs of their own.

Header image thanks to Charles Atkeison on Flickr