¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

During performance reviews¹, it’s handy to obtain an overview of your accomplishments that are stored as artifacts in source control systems.

Usually accomplishments for a software engineer span more than just code: design documents, documentation, bug triage and fixes, product health initiatives, tackling of technical debt, processes…the list is endless.

Nonetheless in this post I’ll focus only in contributions in the form of code.

99.999% of the time this means git commits (and/or pull requests, if you will).

Other than git, and the very very very occasional mercurial (hg), the only other VCS I used significantly was Google’s Perforce / Piper.

Piper #

Although there are command-line tools to summarize your accomplishments, I find the easiest way to do so is via Critique.

Your CL submissions #

Use a query like:

(author:me OR pair:me) is:submitted since:2024-01-03 to:2024-01-09

Update since and to according to the current PERF / GRAD cycle.

If you are a high-performer and/or send lots of LSCs (large-scale changes), the output can be noisy. Filter it out with d:{description} as needed.

For example, to call out LSC changes in a separate section in your packet, you may want to exclude them from your overall contributions with -d:LSC or -d:Rosie or similar.

pair is for crediting pair programming.

Disclaimer: There is a possibility the syntax is incorrect, as I am not able to test it at the moment.

Your CL reviews #

r:me is:submitted since:2024-01-03 to:2024-01-09

You’ll likely want to call out readability reviews separately. Use something like -cc:typescript-readability-approvers.

git #

One option is to use the web UI of your forge (GitHub, GitLab, etc).

I strive for a forge-agnostic solution though.

Your pull requests / commits #

git shortlog is your friend!

Example for this blog:

% git shortlog --author="Thiago Perrotta" --since="6 months ago"  # alt: --since="2024-03-01"
Thiago Perrotta (499):
      Initial commit
      add gitignore: go,hugo,vim
      hugo: add config.toml and default archetype
[...]

If there are multiple repositories, combine the command with myrepos:

% mr run git shortlog --author="Thiago Perrotta"

To filter out irrelevant commits, use grep -v. Example:

% git shortlog --author="Thiago Perrotta" | grep -Ev '^\s*ci|^.*pre-commit'

…filters out commits that contain “ci” or “pre-commit” in the message summary.

Your PR reviews #

PR reviews are a concept from forges. From a git CLI perspective it would only be possible to do so when automation adds git tags to commits e.g. Reviewed-by: Thiago Perrotta <thiago@example.com>.

Gerrit does that. An example Chromium review. In this case, one could just grep for Reviewed-by in git log.

Otherwise: on GitHub, use a query such as is:pr reviewed-by:@me in the Pull Request search tab.