Caveat lector

This post discusses tools reluctantly written with AI assistance. If you don’t entertain using them under any circumstance, and think even reading about them legally compromise your ability to reimplement them yourselves, stop reading now

Happy Friday! Of course it’s not Friday anymore in Asia, and if I finish this post in time, it’s still the work day in the Western Hemisphere.

When you work in a large distributed project, it’s not dissimilar to working in a large multinational company - there are too many people to know everyone (or at least not at once!) and you might not know where someone is and if you’re pinging them in the middle of the night.

Sometimes tooling helps - if your company uses Slack, for instance, you can easily see someone’s local time. My company has similar systems that we won’t discuss here. But what do you use for Fedora and CentOS specifically?

In the original Sandogasa announcement I introduced sandogasa-hattrack - at the time it already surfaces if someone has a custom status set (e.g. they might be on vacation).

With version 0.12.0 Hat Track can now display a user’s local time - so you know if it’s late at night - and even better, you can check if it’s a public holiday! And the output is colour-coded so you know which is which. If you set your location in the Fedora Account System and/or in Fedora’s Discourse these will be shown (if you are temporarily traveling, one neat hack is you can keep FAS in place and update your location in Discourse, and the tool will show both).

$ sandogasa-hattrack last-seen --only discourse,distgit,bodhi salimma
Looking up salimma in FASJSON...
Checking Discourse...
Checking Bodhi...
Checking dist-git...
Last seen: salimma

  Local time:    2026-06-05 17:20:59 IST (Fri — weekday)
  Country:       IE

  Bodhi          2026-06-05T10:02:15+00:00 (6 hours ago)
                 last update submitted
  Dist-git       2026-06-04T23:59:59+00:00 (16 hours ago)
                 last active on 2026-06-04
  Discourse      2026-06-03T13:25:34.689+00:00 (2 days ago)
                 last post

$ sandogasa-hattrack last-seen --only discourse,distgit,bodhi salimma --now 2026-06-01
Looking up salimma in FASJSON...
Checking Discourse...
Checking Bodhi...
Checking dist-git...
Last seen: salimma

  Local time:    2026-06-01 01:00:00 IST (Mon — holiday)
  Country:       IE
  Holiday:       June Holiday (Lá Saoire i mí an Mheithimh)

  Bodhi          2026-06-05T10:02:15+00:00 (6 hours ago)
                 last update submitted
  Dist-git       2026-06-04T23:59:59+00:00 (16 hours ago)
                 last active on 2026-06-04
  Discourse      2026-06-03T13:25:34.689+00:00 (2 days ago)
                 last post

$ sandogasa-hattrack last-seen --only discourse,distgit,bodhi petersen
Looking up petersen in FASJSON...
Checking Discourse...
Checking Bodhi...
Checking dist-git...
Last seen: petersen

  Local time:    2026-06-05 08:22:51 -08 (Fri)  [FAS]
  Local time:    2026-06-06 00:22:51 +08 (Sat — weekend)  [Discourse]
  Country:       SG

  Dist-git       2026-06-03T23:59:59+00:00 (1 day ago)
                 last active on 2026-06-03
  Bodhi          2026-06-03T19:06:42+00:00 (1 day ago)
                 last update submitted
  Discourse      2026-05-29T10:55:48.950+00:00 (1 week ago)
                 last post

You’ll have to imagine the colour output as I don’t really want to embed PNGs in this post :)

Feedback time

This is on its way to the testing repos tonight.

Let me know if this is useful to you or if you have requests for improvement or bugfixes! Please file requests at the issue tracker.

If this gains traction I’m hoping to basically propose to replace the current vacation calendar - which nobody really uses or knows about - with this.

This post is day 36 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.

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