raisely / tiny-timestamp

Unique small timestamps

TinyTimstamp

Unique small timestamps.

Handy for cross referencing logs or error reports, especially if your users tend to send you screenshots and you don't want to be transcribing long codes.

It encodes a timestamp based on process.hrtime() to create unique identifiers. See below for how this is handled

npm install tiny-timestamp

const { decodeStamp, tinyStamp, toISOString } = require('tiny-timestamp');

const value = tinyStamp();
const originalTime = decodeStamp(value);

console.log(value); // '2tLJTc:s9V'
console.log(originalTime); // [ 1606876750, 123451 ]
console.log(toISOString(value)); // '2020-12-02T02:39:10.000123451'

// You can shorten identifiers by setting a repeat interval
// and any precision above that period will be discarded

const month = 60 * 60 * 24 * 30; // in seconds
const shorterValue = tinyStamp({
	repeatableInterval: month,
	time: originalTime,
});
console.log(shorterValue); // -eXc:s9V

// You won't be able to get back the exact original time
console.log(decodeStamp(shorterValue)); // [ 2428750, 123451 ]
console.log(toISOString(shorterValue)); // '1970-01-29T02:39:10.000123451'

Under the hood

hrtime() produces a time in nanoseconds, though it's not guaranteed to have nanosecond precision, the precision should be good enough to give a low likelihood of collision between two identifiers.

However, because hrtime() is calculated in seconds from some arbitrary time, on it's own it can't produce a good unique identifier. tinyStamp replaces the seconds value from hrtime with the seconds since the UNIX epoch.

In other words

const arbitraryTime = process.hrtime();
const fixedTime = [parseInt(new Date() / 1000), arbitraryTime[1]];