Show absolute datetimes instead of "X days ago" with hover

Feedback & Bug Reports Product Feedback
1

This was the bane of social networks and somehow this made into developer tools everywhere.

Human beings are not computers. We cannot compute 4 days ago on the fly especially if there are potentially dozens of “4 days ago” entries in a build list. We don’t write “4 days ago” into logs because that would prevent us from quickly and efficiently figuring out what was wrong.

“But you can hover over a thing” adds friction. Why should I hover over something when it’s much easier for the UI to go ahead and display the unadulterated date? Why make us hover over a small and inconsistently sized target?

A very quick and easy example: a continuous deployment pipeline. A few deploys a day. Errors start showing up in logs at 2020-04-04 15:23. Which deploy was that? Let’s hop over to Circle CI. 5 min ago, 1 hour ago, 1 day ago, 1 day ago, 1 day ago, 1 day ago, 2 days ago, 2 days ago Wait what? I need a build/deploy that happened right before 2020-04-04 15:23.

The weirdness of this situation is that it’s harder to display “X ago” than to display a date. So why bother?

6 Likes
2

I’m totally with you. Actually, to be fair, it’s the same on the “old” UI still. Or did I miss a setting? :thinking:

3

Yup. The old UI has the same problem :slight_smile:

4

@Kate_Catlin any chance you could make this happen? :slight_smile:

IMHO upto 3 hours ago is sorta easy when doing PRs etc, but beyond that absolute is really helpful.

Also curious if you are hearing otherwise

1 Like
5

I want to see if two jobs ran at the same time (to check for interference), so I would like to see the time started and ended not only for the job, but for the steps as well. The exact times please.

6

A year later this is still the case.

7

We’ve had a lot of discussion about this internally, and we’ve tested a few different versions. One of our PMs will reach out because I think it would really helpful to chat with you about how we can improve this.