Hello /r/softwaredevelopment !

I’m Patrick. I’ve been writing software professionally for about twenty five years, and I’m as enthusiastic about it as ever 🙂 I’ve created a tool for busy software teams, and I’m very interested in your feedback. I’ll outline the problems it addresses, and how it works. Thanks for reading!

The Problem

In busy teams making lots of commits, I’ve seen some problems come up repeatedly:

1. How to keep the team up-to-date with today’s changes? The daily standup meeting is good for a high-level catchup, but it generally can’t include the specifics of individual commits. Realtime commit alerts are distracting and break your concentration. Not using realtime alerts can mean missing important commits if you aren’t regularly checking the commit logs. Out-of-touch developers results in more bugs and lower productivity.
2. Team members do good work, but it can go unacknowledged. People get demoralized if they have fixed a hard bug or written a cool feature but their colleagues are so busy that they don’t say “well done”. Conversely, teams with a culture of informally discussing each other’s work (and saying “well done”) build stronger working relationships and trust. This is even more important with the switch to remote working.
3. It’s hard to get a fast overview of where today’s commits changed the codebase. One commit can touch large (and unexpected) parts of the codebase, or many commits may be concentrated in one file/directory. This is important information, but it’s hard to see by looking at the file list for each commit.

The Solution

In some teams, we had a cron job that sent a list of the day’s commits to the team. We called this “The Dailies”. I’ve heard of this being done in many productive software teams, and it’s surprisingly effective at keeping the team up to date without distracting them. However, it only addresses the first of the three problems above, and it’s restricted to email so it’s quite limited. I think it’s possible to do much better. My solution is called GitDailies.

The GitDailies website has more details (https://GitDailies.com), but here’s a quick summary:

• At the same time every day, a summary of the commits in the last 24 hours (a “Daily”) is delivered to your team’s private area on the GitDailies website. Your team is notified by Slack or Email.
• GitDailies assigns badges that show commit properties. (I have lots of plans for this!).
• Team members can give each other “Kudos” for commits. The Commit and the User with most Kudos today are highlighted in tomorrow’s Daily. No more “hidden” or unacknowledged work 🙂
• There is a Visualizer for interactively exploring where/how today’s commits changed the repository.
• GitDailies is available as a GitHub app for both public and private GitHub repos (if you are interested in GitLab, or plain-Git, please let me know).

If you have a busy team and would like to become beta users, I would love to have you on board! You can get access at https://GitDailies.com

Any and all feedback is gratefully received. If you want to follow along with the product, you can follow me (@Patrick_J9) or GitDailies (@gitdailies) on Twitter.

Thanks for reading this far! Any questions, just ask 🙂

Patrick