DEV Community: Vlad Nedelcu

Calculating the number of seconds until midnight

Vlad Nedelcu — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 13:03:25 +0000

I know this might be very straight forward for some developers but I found this a pretty intriguing and fun quick problem to solve, it also might help some beginners furthermore.

How can you find the number of seconds until midnight ?....with python...in an elegant way.

My first approach to this was to subtract from the 24 hours the number of hours that passed today, and so multiply with 60 to get the number of seconds.

from datetime import datetime

number_of_seconds_until_midnight = (24 - datetime.now().hour) * 60 * 60

The pros of this formula is that is fast, but it lack the readability of python coding. By using datetime package from python you can increase the readability and the code follows as this:

from datetime import datetime, timedelta, time

now = datetime.now()
midnight = datetime.combine(now + timedelta(days=1), time())
seconds_until_midnight = (midnight - now).seconds

midnight is calculated by combining tomorrow date with time, which will strip the time to 00:00.
seconds_until_midnight subtract from midnight datetime the now datetime to get the time-frame between these two.

You can also add all this to a method:

from datetime import datetime, timedelta, time

def seconds_until_midnight() -> int:
   '''Calculate seconds until midnight'''
   now = datetime.now()
   midnight = datetime.combine(now + timedelta(days=1), time())

   return (midnight - now).seconds

Where to store users number of tries ?

Vlad Nedelcu — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 08:37:22 +0000

Hi guys, I am looking on some alternatives on were to store apps users consumable actions. For example, number of tries of doing something in the app per day.

Should I go ahead an store everything in a db table ?
How will this affect the performance if the number of users rise ?

And last but not least, this has to reset at the end of the day.

[UPDATE] I found an easy way to handle this by storing the dynamic data in the cache ..can be redis.. with a TTL set to it. The max or min for the counter is stored in the DB.

This way you can store counters/values that are consumable by the user and have it reset without a background job.

Do you feel like time is going faster ?

Vlad Nedelcu — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 12:52:51 +0000

Lately I found myself working at my job during the day and leave my personal projects, learning and other coding stuff in the early morning or in the evening.

One thing that happened is that I feel like the amount of work that I do while learning, customizing my career plan and doing side projects is less during this lockdown period. During my early years in software development career I would finish up work much faster and find interesting ideas.

Do you feel the same ?

If you do I would like to see some opinions about this or some good reads about this phenomenon as I want to tackle this problem.