My little adventure with the timely arrival code
So, I decided to build this little thing I called the “timely arrival code”. Why? Honestly, I was just tired of guessing if I’d make it somewhere on time. Always doing that quick math in my head, sometimes getting it wrong, you know? I figured, why not just make a simple tool to do it for me. Nothing fancy, just something reliable.
First off, I sat down and just thought about what I actually needed. It boiled down to a few things:
- When am I leaving? (Departure time)
- How long is the trip gonna take? (Travel duration)
- When do I absolutely need to be there? (Required arrival time)
Seemed simple enough on paper. I fired up my usual coding setup – just a basic text editor, nothing special – and decided to use Python. It’s usually pretty good for handling dates and times without giving me too much of a headache.
Getting the inputs was the first step. I made it ask for the departure hour and minute, then the travel time purely in minutes (easier that way), and finally the required arrival hour and minute. Straightforward.
Then came the slightly tricky part: calculating the actual arrival time. Adding minutes sounds easy, but you gotta handle rolling over the hour mark. Like, if you leave at 8:45 AM and travel for 30 minutes, you arrive at 9:15 AM, not 8:75 AM, right? And what about trips that go past midnight? Yeah, that needed some careful thought. I messed around with Python’s built-in time stuff – `datetime` objects, `timedelta` – that helped a lot. It took a couple of tries to get the logic right, especially making sure the hours and days ticked over correctly if the travel was long.
Once I could reliably calculate the actual arrival time based on the departure and duration, the final step was just comparing it. Is my calculated arrival time earlier than, or exactly the same as, the required arrival time? A simple check, really. An `if` statement does the job.
I made it spit out a clear message. Something like “Yep, you’ll make it on time!” or “Uh oh, looks like you’ll be late.” Simple, direct, tells me what I need to know.
Of course, I had to test it. Plugged in different times: leaving super early, cutting it close, definitely leaving too late. Threw in a scenario that crossed midnight just to be sure. Found a small bug where my hour calculation was off by one under a specific condition, but I squashed that pretty quick.
So, now I have this little script. It doesn’t fetch real-time traffic or anything complex like a maps app, but that wasn’t the point. It just does that one calculation reliably. I run it, feed it the times, and it tells me if my plan works. Job done. Helps me feel a bit more organized, less stressed about being late. It’s basic, but it’s my basic, and it works.
