cRonstrue
Way back in 2012, I started work on and eventually released a library called cron-expression-descriptor which takes a cron expression and describes the cron scheduled in human readable text. You know, */5 * * * * > "Every 5 minutes". It filled a need and gained quite a bit of usage and contribution activity from the community. In particular, developers working with the Quartz Job Scheduler library found it useful. It would be translated to 14 languages and ported to Java, Ruby and Python. It was a fun library to write, maintain and use as a catalyst to learn new things (like handling i18n in .NET and publishing a package to NuGet).
A few weeks ago I was listening to the Changelog podcast, episode #210 with Alan Shreve, the smart guy behind ngrok. Alan mentioned that the way he likes to learn a new language/ecosystem is to take an existing codebase and port it over. I like this approach, and agree. It prompted me to port cron-expression-descriptor over to JavaScript since I am using JavaScript more and more these days at work and on side projects. Just when I think I have a fairly good handle on JavaScript, I realize there is so much more for me to learn. Porting this library over to JavaScript would be a good opportunity to learn not only JavaScript syntax in a deeper way but also the everchanging ecosystem and tooling around it.
So, I started work on a JavaScript port which I eventually named cRonstrue (I like this name much more than cron-expression-descriptor, BTW π ). I used TypeScript for the source, Mocha (with Chai) for unit tests, and webpack for bundling the final distributables. I learned a bunch of stuff along the way and it was fun!
Example Usage
var cronstrue = require('cronstrue');
console.log(cronstrue.toString("23 12 * * SUN#2));
> "At 12:23 PM, on the second Sunday of the month"// i18n support
var cronstrue_i18n = require('cronstrue/i18n');
console.log(cronstrue_i18n.toString("*/5 15 * * MON-FRI", { locale: "zh_CN" }));
> "ζ― 5 ει, ε¨ 03:00 PM, ζζδΈ ε° ζζδΊ"