Synca

The problem

"Standup is at fri 5pm PT." Great — what time is that in Kyiv? Every distributed team translates times dozens of times a day, and the tools for it live in another tab, far from the text you're reading.

The approach

Synca is a Chrome extension that treats time as a first-class citizen of the page you're on:

• On-page detection — it scans for dates and times in text and re-renders them in your local timezone, right where they are.
• Quick converter — paste fri 5pm PT, get every zone you care about.
• Multi-zone roster — a panel of cities you choose, always comparable at a glance.
• DST-aware — it warns when a clock change falls inside the converted window, the classic off-by-one-hour trap.
• Local-first — 12/24-hour formats, light/dark theming that follows the system, and localization for all 55 Chrome locales.

No servers, no accounts, no data collection — the entire product runs in the browser, which is both a privacy stance and an operating-cost strategy: zero.

The details that make it feel right

The invisible work is in the corner cases:

• Ambiguous times — "5pm" with no zone is read in an assumed source zone you configure, because guessing wrong is worse than asking. Your system timezone is the default; every conversion states what it assumed.
• DST edge — a conversion that crosses a clock change is flagged, not just computed: the off-by-one-hour trap kills scheduled meetings, so the warning matters more than the number.
• Hover for the breakdown — any detected time opens the full multi-zone view on hover or click, so the roster is one gesture away from the text you're reading.
• Everywhere — detection runs on any page you visit, not an allow-list, and the UI ships in all 55 Chrome locales so the product doesn't feel foreign the moment it isn't English.

The landing site is its own small project — Astro + GSAP, deployed on Cloudflare Workers — because the store listing alone can't show motion.

The outcome

A free extension on the Chrome Web Store with its own landing at synca-extension.com — "times in your timezone, right on the page." The constraint that shaped it most: be useful in the two seconds between reading a time and wondering.