It’s that time of the year, when you hit the last few weeks of the year and wonder, what did I manage to do this year?
This may be on your own accord of reflecting on the past year, it may be because you have your annual performance review, or maybe even wanting some ammo to use for negotiating a new raise or promotion.
Either way, if you use Git, you can use that journal log of your work to help trigger memories of what you did for the past year.
We will take a look at how to build this up to be generic, so that it can be run any time of any year, across any of your Git branches.
First, we want to find commits that we were the author of. As we can have our author name be different across Git repos we want to look at who we are according to that repo based on our Git config settings.
git config --get user.name # Proctor
We will put that in a Bash function for nice naming and ease of use later on.
function my_git_user_name() {
git config --get user.name
}
We also want to know what year it is, so we can look at commits for this year.
We will use the date command to get the current year.
date +'%Y' # 2015
Again, we will create a Bash function for that as well.
function this_year() {
date +'%Y'
}
We also want to know what last year was, so we can know the beginning of this year. We bust out bc for this to do some calculation at the command line. We take the current year – 1 and pass that to bc to get last year.
echo "$(this_year)-1" | bc # 2014
Wrap that in a function.
function last_year() {
echo "$(this_year)-1" | bc
}
And now we can get the end of last year, being December 31st.
echo "$(last_year)-12-31" # 2014-12-31
And of course, we put that into another function.
function end_of_last_year() {
echo "$(last_year)-12-31"
}
And now we can use both end_of_last_year and my_git_user_name to find the Git commits I was the author of since the beginning of the year.
git log --author="$(my_git_user_name)" --after="$(end_of_last_year)" origin/master
Note that this checks against ‘origin/masterso if you call (one of) your canonical remote(s) something other thanorigin` you will need to update this, but this will show all those items that have made it into master that you have worked on.
And because of convenience, we will put this in a function, so we can call in nice and easy.
function my_commits_for_this_past_year()
{
git log --author="$(my_git_user_name)" --after="$(end_of_last_year)" origin/master
}
And to call it we just need to type “ at the command line.
Having these functions, it also allows us to add it to our Git aliases or .bash_profile so we can have easy access to call it from anywhere.
### What did I do in git this past year?
function this_year() {
date +'%Y'
}
function last_year() {
echo "$(this_year)-1" | bc
}
function end_of_last_year() {
echo "$(last_year)-12-31"
}
function my_git_user_name() {
git config --get user.name
}
function my_commits_for_this_past_year()
{
git log --author="$(my_git_user_name)" --after="$(end_of_last_year)" origin/master
}
This makes it nice and easy to filter your Git commits and trace through your history on a project, and refresh your memory of what you have actually touched, instead of misremembering what year it was done, or forgetting about that small little fix that wound up having a big impact.
–Proctor