At a previous job, software testers had to write reports every Mon/Wed/Fri on what they did and e-mail them to their supervisor.<p>One of them got pretty tired of writing the same shit, and was like 99% sure the supervisor wasn't reading the reports, so started adding "I don't think anybody is reading these. This is a waste of my time." right above his e-mail signature.<p>It took over 3 months before it got noticed. Supervisor wasn't pleased, but had to admit he was right. He still required reports, but only on Fridays.
I did something similar to this a while back with a one-liner aliased in my Bash includes, called gitsum (short for git summary).<p><pre><code> alias gitsum='git log --pretty=format:"* %s" --author `git config user.email`' #myself
</code></pre>
It gives my git commit messages as a Markdown bullet-point list. It only works per-branch unlike the linked gist, but one cool thing about it is that you can tack on additional git flags, such as --since. For example:<p><pre><code> gitsum --since 1.day
gitsum --since 1.week
gitsum --since 8.hours
</code></pre>
I usually pipe this into my clipboard (on Mac) to easily paste it into the time logging or reporting system:<p><pre><code> gitsum --since 1.day | pbcopy</code></pre>
There was a time where my company decided to implement time sheets after a consultant said it is a nice thing to do.<p>I wrote some code that generated random data in the right format and people begged for it so I shared it.<p>Plenty of people started to create random reports, their bosses didn't give a fuck because they were pissed of as well (and wanted to use my tool as well).<p>The company ended up with a heap of nonsense data and I guess that someone realized that because this circus was gone after a few months.<p>That was in one of the largest and best known US company in the 00's, no wonder it went from a national pride to a peripheral company.
I look forward to the day the manager can have a daily standup/progress report meeting oblivious to the fact that (s)he is the only one actually present... One step closer!
This seems like a good place to integrate an LLM - go above and beyond with lengthy, formal-sounding descriptions. Spot check the first few of them, because someone might read those, but after that they'll just be impressed at the work you're putting into your updates and never read them because they're long anyway.
LOL
I have to do weekly report and submit it every Friday.
The kicker is, I have a meeting Monday morning about what I'm doing the week and what I worked on last week.<p>No team meetings, everyone is soloed.<p>Management is great.
the daily report is a joke, our team did it years ago, then it stopped...
anyone will read it? the PM or the lead will read it?<p>we had a bot in our chat app, it auto asks everyone the questions 2 times daily, what did you do, what you are working etc...
At my last place they wanted everyone to assign 'effort' numbers to tasks in the scrum tool, and we had to write something to generate a nag report if the weekly effort per person didn't add up to a particular number.<p>What happened? Well, a per-sprint task to track overhead and PTO is what happened. Which many people just added 40 hours of effort to.
Nice! Definitely agree with the sentiment! Might be worth investigating<p><pre><code> git log -p | gpt4
</code></pre>
if management starts requiring something more organic-looking.
For litigation use, even semi-regularly keeping a daily log can help to show independent development. That can help defeat claims of misappropriation of another party's trade secrets and/or infringing copying of another party's copyrighted material.<p>I mean, whom are you more likely to believe:<p>1) someone who — when being sued — said, <i>oh, no, we didn't steal your technology, we developed this independently</i>, or<p>2) someone who said the same thing and also had at least some contemporaneous documentation to corroborate the assertion?<p>(Incidentally, this is one of those areas where perfect is the enemy of good enough.)
Had to do something similar in my company.
We had to write how long we worked on a projects and what the task was.
This was due every month and of course I only did it at the end of the month.
It was all already planned and everybody knew what was being done, it was just an annoying layer on top that took hours.
So I made a script that listed my git commits, searched the Jira ticket associated with it and gave me the tags in those tickets.
The art of being lazy amirite
I recently stopped writing these, along without about 50% of my coworkers. Morale is at a low point, due to layoffs and general corporate dysfunction. I'm seeing if anyone complains. So far, nobody has!
Thank you for sharing! I’ve never understood the purpose of this activity. I’m pretty sure no one bothers to read them and even if they do they don’t understand them.
I have a script like this in my "Monthly Reports". I'm not a software dev or working on a single project, so it goes through the config's "recent.repo" list and prints each with the commits back to a month ago. More of a tool to remember what I've done.
TL;DR: I plan and it helps me.<p>When I'm working in IC mode:<p>- I plan for the next day at the end of the day (org-mode).<p>- If I'm working on planned tasks (programming, demoing, documentation, etc.) I tick checkboxes. These tasks are usually small enough to do in 1-2 hours.<p>- I also tick checkboxes for must do things e.g. when on call.<p>I'm sceptical about planning and working on a bunch of things without putting them down.
Pipe it through ChatGPT and create some nice long prose reports that nobody will read either, but that make you look like you spent hours on, if that's what your organization is rewarding.