No worries at all. Taking long to connect can be a a number of factors from your wireless router to signal strength etc. If you notice in the code there is a line that says:
int kRetries = 10;
If you find it’s not connecting quickly and it times out a lot (flashes 4 times over and over) before it connects, you can increase that retry value to say 20 or 30. The code sits in the connect loop longer if you do that rather than timing out early.
As for timers, now that you have it running with HA, you can do anything.
Check this HASS sprinkler
Good luck.