[HN Gopher] Show HN: Automating daily reports, because fuck it
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Show HN: Automating daily reports, because fuck it
Author : yzdbgd
Score : 74 points
Date : 2023-06-02 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gist.github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gist.github.com)
| Atlas22 wrote:
| 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!
| Thespian2 wrote:
| Personal AI LLM chatbot, trained on my emails and slack
| messages. I will have succeeded in replacing myself with a
| small shell script.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| mprovost wrote:
| We used to receive so many automatically generated emails and I
| really doubted that anyone was reading them but every time I
| asked if I could disable them people would swear that they were
| essential. I got so sick of them that I commented out the line
| in the script that sent them with a note that I would pay $20
| if someone found that line. Nobody ever noticed that the emails
| stopped and I left years later without paying.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| One of the first things I do at every job is setup outlook
| rules to auto forward all those Atlassian, slack, etc auto
| generated emails to respective folders. I never look at them,
| it's never a problem. It's amazing the huge effect that
| reducing the information overload has on one's day to day
| sanity.
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| I have to admit that I extended the filters to include
| email sent to selected distribution groups and from one or
| two specific colleagues. Also any email that was cc'ed to
| me from certain other colleagues - the ones who cc loads of
| people. Got more done that way.
|
| (In a large educational establishment, not IT).
| blowski wrote:
| If I could filter them out on Slack. It is a boon for the
| over-communicators.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| I did the exact same thing years ago, except, after about two
| or three daily reports I took the immature route. I started
| inserting lines like, "10:45am, took a shit", "11:03am,
| scratched my balls", "11:04am, farted; smells like Robertos",
| and so on. The main difference in my situation was my
| supervisor noticed immediately. However, the daily reports
| stopped anyway. The rumor I heard was that my supervisor took
| my immature reports to his boss in hopes of getting his
| blessing to fire me, however, his boss actually turned it
| around on him, saying the daily reports requirement was
| counter-productive, and "treat people like children and they'll
| act like children".
| VanTodi wrote:
| 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
| openquery wrote:
| Very cool. Another incentive to write good commit messages.
| pmarreck wrote:
| There's an AI script I wrote for that =) Seems to work very
| well, too!
|
| https://github.com/pmarreck/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/functio...
| jupp0r wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| sakerbos wrote:
| I've used something similar to create release notes, pretty
| handy, just make sure your commits contain enough emojis.
| nittanymount wrote:
| 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?
|
| 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...
| jmclnx wrote:
| Yes, but I think these are just saved to when something bad
| happens. Then the Managers will review them looking for someone
| to blame. Just a CYA activity.
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| Yeah, I dig that. At the same time you'd think that a semi-
| competent analyst with some git chops would be able to
| interpret the _precise_ crisis far easier than Random
| Executive Guy could re-create past event from "daily logs"
| and his Mark I Eyeball[1]. No one hand-flies anymore, don't
| see why management analysis should be the exception.
|
| I guess, end of the day, that requirement - for daily reports
| - is sort of a red flag all by itself. Once they get to that
| point, something's borked.
|
| [1] Oh, and his Leadership. I heard executives have that.
| makestuff wrote:
| The last startup I was at went hardcore with their JIRA
| Hygiene. All of the developers complained, but it turns out
| our director saw the layoff writing on the wall. He wanted as
| much ammunition as possible to try and save his org. Once the
| consultant came in that the board hired, the first thing they
| dug into was the JIRA tickets.
|
| The funny part about this though was that our team had
| amazing JIRA hygiene because we barely had any work to do
| (I'm not exaggerating when I say I would have about 5 hours
| of work a week, I would try to help other teams out but that
| was "stepping on other teams turf"). The teams that had the
| worst JIRA hygiene were the core platform teams shipping new
| features. Our team built internal tools so we didn't have to
| care about UX/scaling/etc.
|
| Ultimately some of our team was laid off, but it made me
| realize upper management really had no idea what was going on
| since they were not technical. All they saw was pretty JIRA
| graphs and thought our team was a bunch of rockstars.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| 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.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Nice! Definitely agree with the sentiment! Might be worth
| investigating git log -p | gpt4
|
| if management starts requiring something more organic-looking.
| swyx wrote:
| does such a gpt4 cli tool exist? i mean sure itd be easy to
| write one but i wouldnt mind trying one off the shelf
| vharuck wrote:
| 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.
| tejtm wrote:
| too much too much rework, just slap a `.atom` on the back of your
| GH URL and be done with it.
| chrisshroba wrote:
| What does this mean? I tried adding .atom to the OP url and got
| a 404
| notatoad wrote:
| i think they mean like this: https://github.com/yzdbg.atom -
| gives the rss feed of the original author's public github
| activity
| clint wrote:
| I remember writing this script 20 years ago
| nevertoolate wrote:
| TL;DR: I plan and it helps me.
|
| When I'm working in IC mode:
|
| - I plan for the next day at the end of the day (org-mode).
|
| - 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.
|
| - I also tick checkboxes for must do things e.g. when on call.
|
| I'm sceptical about planning and working on a bunch of things
| without putting them down.
| kulahan wrote:
| I have the same problem as you, but I just tell everyone that
| all official requests have to go through email because my
| memory is bad. Then it's a lot easier for me to track. Wayyyyy
| too many people tried to manage me by just walking by and
| spitting out some random tasker they needed done.
| saxonww wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| JangoSteve wrote:
| I did something similar to this a while back with a one-liner
| aliased in my Bash includes, called gitsum (short for git
| summary). alias gitsum='git log
| --pretty=format:"* %s" --author `git config user.email`' #myself
|
| 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: gitsum --since 1.day
| gitsum --since 1.week gitsum --since 8.hours
|
| I usually pipe this into my clipboard (on Mac) to easily paste it
| into the time logging or reporting system:
| gitsum --since 1.day | pbcopy
| masukomi wrote:
| a) cool
|
| b) here's the same thing but redone as a git alias (in the
| [alias] section of your ~/.gitconfig). This would be invoked as
| `git logme`
|
| logme = !git log --pretty=format:\"* %s\" --author `git config
| user.email`
| thedangler wrote:
| 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.
|
| No team meetings, everyone is soloed.
|
| Management is great.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's... good, right? You write a report on Friday, and come
| Monday morning you can just read the points from that very
| report during the meeting. Zero stress.
| masukomi wrote:
| sounds like friday is backwards looking and monday is
| forwards looking but yes, that'd be good too because you'd
| know what was expected of you the coming week.
| dilap wrote:
| This seems very reasonable!
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| There was a time where my company decided to implement time
| sheets after a consultant said it is a nice thing to do.
|
| I wrote some code that generated random data in the right format
| and people begged for it so I shared it.
|
| 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).
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| throwuwu wrote:
| 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.
| grav wrote:
| Flee.
| dctoedt wrote:
| 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.
|
| I mean, whom are you more likely to believe:
|
| 1) someone who -- when being sued -- said, _oh, no, we didn 't
| steal your technology, we developed this independently_, or
|
| 2) someone who said the same thing and also had at least some
| contemporaneous documentation to corroborate the assertion?
|
| (Incidentally, this is one of those areas where perfect is the
| enemy of good enough.)
| ixwt wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but a podcast I used to follow did a "Bar Exam
| Question of the Week". One of the questions had to do with
| frequent business records being an exemption to hearsay. By
| that question, I'd say this would be the exact purpose of this
| kind of record keeping. Though, I don't think it has to be
| daily, just some constant interval.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Have you heard of this thing called Git?
| icedchai wrote:
| 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!
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(page generated 2023-06-02 23:01 UTC)