Experiment 3
A generated weekly summary of everything I shipped, assembled from commits and issues. Runs on a schedule and emails itself to me on Friday afternoon.
Running quietly for six months
No changes since February, which is the best thing I can say about it. It runs on Friday, the email arrives, and I read it.
The unexpected benefit is not the summary itself. It is that knowing a summary is coming changes how I write commit messages during the week.
Cut the summary in half
The first version listed everything. That was noise: forty lines nobody reads, including me.
Now it lists at most five things and a single sentence about what moved. Shorter took considerably more work than complete.
If a summary needs skimming, it is not a summary.
Scheduled and shipped
Pulls from the API, groups by repository, renders a plain text email. Around two hundred lines in total.
The whole thing exists because I kept failing to answer "what did you get done this week?" in a stand-up.