🕐 Clock

The world's most over-engineered way to display today's date
Now with 100% more CO2 emissions per timestamp!

What is this madness?

A fully automated, TypeScript-powered, CI/CD-integrated npm package that tells you what day it is. Because new Date() was apparently too simple.

Live demo: clock-ai.vercel.app

The Rube Goldberg Machine 🎪

Here's how this beautiful disaster works:

1. ⏰ n8n Schedule Trigger fires every minute
2. 📅 Date & Time Node grabs the current timestamp
3. 🤖 GitHub API commits the date to data/date.json with a feat: message
4. 🎯 Release Please detects the commit and creates a version bump PR
5. 🪝 GitHub Webhook catches the PR creation
6. 🤝 n8n Auto-merge immediately merges the PR (because who needs code review?)
7. 🚀 GitHub Actions builds, tests, and publishes to npm with provenance
8. 📦 Dependabot in clock-web detects the new version
9. 🔄 Auto-merge merges the dependency update
10. ☁️ Vercel auto-deploys to production

Result: The website updates with today's date... which you could have just checked on your phone.

Installation

npm install @christopher-drifte/clock

Usage

import { date } from '@christopher-drifte/clock';

console.log(date);
// Output: "Today is 12 March 2026"

API

date

A string containing today's date formatted as "Today is [day] [month] [year]".

TypeScript types included! ✨

Features

• ✅ Browser-compatible (uses JSON imports, no fs modules)
• ✅ TypeScript with full type definitions
• ✅ Automated version management with Release Please
• ✅ Published with npm provenance for supply chain security
• ✅ Auto-deployed to production via Dependabot + Vercel
• ✅ Maximum cloud computing resources for minimal functionality
• ✅ Changelog auto-generated for every date update
• ❌ Zero practical value

Architecture

n8n (local)
  ↓
GitHub API (commit)
  ↓
Release Please (PR)
  ↓
n8n Webhook (auto-merge)
  ↓
GitHub Actions (build + publish)
  ↓
npm Registry
  ↓
Dependabot (clock-web repo)
  ↓
Auto-merge workflow
  ↓
Vercel (deployment)
  ↓
🎉 Production!

Why?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To demonstrate modern DevOps practices? To practice CI/CD? To see if we could?

Honestly, we're not sure anymore. But it works, it's tested, and it deploys automatically. That's got to count for something.

Development

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Run tests
npm test

# Build
npm run build

Sister Projects

• clock-web - React app that displays the date from this package
• clock-ai.vercel.app - Live deployment

Carbon Footprint 🌍

Every date update triggers:

• 1 n8n workflow execution
• 2 GitHub Actions workflows
• 1 npm package publish
• 1 Dependabot PR
• 1 Vercel deployment

Estimated CO2 per date change: More than using a calendar 📅

License

ISC - Because even absurd projects need licenses