Guide · Standups

Your standup is already in git log.

It's 9:58 and standup is at 10. You did real work yesterday, but you can't remember it. Your commits can. One command lists everything you committed yesterday, so you can read your standup instead of reconstructing it.

Yesterday, in one repo

git log --all --since=yesterday.midnight --until=midnight \ --author="$(git config user.email)" --no-merges --format='* %s'

--all includes branches you aren't on right now.
--author keeps it to your commits. If nothing shows up, compare git config user.email with git log -1 --format=%ae: they have to match.
--no-merges hides "Merge branch 'main'" noise.

On a Monday, swap the dates for --since="last friday" and drop --until.

Every repo in your code folder

Most of us touch more than one repository a day. This loops over every repo in a folder and labels each line with the repo it came from:

for d in ~/code/*/.git; do r=${d%/.git} git -C "$r" log --all --since=yesterday.midnight --until=midnight \ --author="$(git config user.email)" --no-merges \ --format="* %s ($(basename "$r"))" done

Change ~/code to wherever you keep your projects.

Make it a git command

Save it once as an alias, then type git standup every morning, or git standup "last friday" on Mondays:

git config --global alias.standup '!git log --all --since="${1:-yesterday.midnight}" --author="$(git config user.email)" --no-merges --format="* %s" #'

From commit messages to a standup

Commit subjects are written for code review, not for your team. Before you paste:

Lead with the outcome. "Sync now retries failed uploads", not "add retry wrapper".
Merge the small ones. Five "fix test" commits are one line: "Fixed the flaky sync tests."
Say what's next. Today is a plan, not a commit, so write it yourself.
Name your blockers. Who you're waiting on, since when, and how many times you've asked.

Need a shape to copy? See 12 standup examples for developers.

Want the tidying done for you? Paste the output into the standup generator. It drops merge commits and feat:/fix: prefixes, groups the multi-repo loop by repo, and formats the result for Slack, Teams or Jira. It runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.

Where git log falls short

A lot of real work never becomes a commit: the review you gave, the bug you reproduced, the hour spent chasing another team for an API. It also only sees the repos on the machine you're sitting at, and it can't tell you what you're blocked on.

Sill fills those gaps. On your Mac it reads your local git history (never your code), adds the tasks you finished and the follow-ups you logged, and writes Yesterday, Today and Blockers for you. It keeps receipts on everything you're waiting on, like "day 6, asked 3×", and syncs to your iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch through your own iCloud. No account, no server, no analytics.

Get Sill free on the App Store — for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.