Show HN: Automating daily reports, because fuck it | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Automating daily reports, because fuck it

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106 pointsyzdbgd53 comments

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.

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.

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.

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).

If I could filter them out on Slack. It is a boon for the over-communicators.

I’ve wished so often I could block Slackbot

“so-and-so archived channel #topicfrom3yearsago”

stfu Slackbot

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".

based

Hackers will always win.

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

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`

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.

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!

Personal AI LLM chatbot, trained on my emails and slack messages. I will have succeeded in replacing myself with a small shell script.

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.

No team meetings, everyone is soloed.

Management is great.

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.

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.

This seems very reasonable!

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nice! Definitely agree with the sentiment! Might be worth investigating

  git log -p | gpt4

if management starts requiring something more organic-looking.

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

https://github.com/simonw/llm

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.)

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.

Have you heard of this thing called Git?

> Have you heard of this thing called Git?

Hmm. Git ... Git ... Let me see: As in, git along, little dogie? Or you stupid git? Or the village in Iran?

(Yes, I'm familiar with Git; its commit records could help corroborate development, too.)

We are commenting on a thread about a tool that uses git!

In case it wasn't clear, I was pointing out how silly it is wasting time recording your development efforts in case of lawsuits when you already have a comprehensive record in Git.

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.

Very cool. Another incentive to write good commit messages.

I remember writing this script 20 years ago

Git is 18 years old

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.

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.

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.

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.

“You sure have been busy Amir, but why are all your task entries Haikus?”

I've used something similar to create release notes, pretty handy, just make sure your commits contain enough emojis.

too much too much rework, just slap a `.atom` on the back of your GH URL and be done with it.

What does this mean? I tried adding .atom to the OP url and got a 404

i think they mean like this: https://github.com/yzdbg.atom - gives the rss feed of the original author's public github activity

correct. Then whoever can use whatever reader to format the stream however and whenever. All for free as far as your extra efforts go, we can put the time into writing better commit messages and we all win.

Are you gonna have those TPS reports for us this afternoon?

Flee.

What a shite place

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