Guide · Standups

12 standup examples for developers.

A good standup takes 30 seconds to read and answers three questions: what moved, what's next, and what's stuck. Here are twelve, one for each kind of day. Copy the shape, not the words.

The rules behind all twelve

1. Feature work, going well

Yesterday: • Saved filters: create and rename work end to end (PR up) • Wrote the migration for existing users' filters Today: • Address review comments, then delete and reorder Blockers: • None

2. Chasing a bug

Yesterday: • Reproduced the duplicate-save bug: two taps within 300 ms on slow networks • Ruled out the network SDK; it's our retry logic Today: • Fix with an idempotency key, add a test for the double tap Blockers: • None, but I'll need a QA pass on Android before Thursday

3. Blocked by another team

Yesterday: • Search screen done against mock data • Followed up with Platform on the search API contract Today: • Error states and empty states while I wait Blockers: • Search API contract — waiting on Platform (day 6, asked 3×). Can someone help me find the right owner?

4. A day of meetings

Yesterday: • Planning for Q1: our team owns search and saved filters • Design review for onboarding; two changes agreed, notes in the doc Today: • Back to saved filters: delete and reorder Blockers: • None

5. Mostly code review

Yesterday: • Reviewed 5 PRs, including the auth refactor (approved with two fixes) • Paired with Sam on the flaky sync tests; now passing 50/50 runs Today: • My own PR for search ranking Blockers: • None

6. On-call

Yesterday: • On call: 2 pages. Disk alert on worker-3 (cleaned up, ticket for log rotation); login 500s for 6 minutes (bad deploy, rolled back) • Postmortem draft for the login incident Today: • Log rotation fix, then hand over on-call Blockers: • None

7. Release day

Yesterday: • 2.4 release candidate passed QA; release notes written • Fixed the last crash on iOS 17 devices Today: • Ship 2.4 at 2 pm, watch crash reports until end of day Blockers: • Need an approver for the App Store submission

8. Monday

Friday: • Merged saved filters; behind a flag for now • Started the search ranking spike Today: • Finish the ranking spike and write up options by Wednesday Blockers: • None

9. Back from time off

Last week: • Out of office Today: • Catching up on the 12 PRs and the search thread • Picking up saved filters from Priya at 11 Blockers: • Need access to the new staging cluster

10. Research or a spike

Yesterday: • Compared 3 approaches for offline sync; CRDTs are overkill for us • Prototyped last-write-wins with a conflict banner (2 hours, works) Today: • Write the one-page recommendation for Thursday's review Blockers: • None

11. A slow day

Yesterday: • Lost the morning to a broken local environment (fixed: wrong Node version, now pinned) • Small progress on the search PR Today: • Finish the search PR Blockers: • None

Slow days happen. Say so in one line and move on; nobody needs a cover story.

12. Leading a small team

Yesterday: • Unblocked Sam on the auth refactor (decision: keep sessions server-side) • Hiring: 2 interviews, one strong yes Today: • Sprint review prep; 1:1s with Priya and Jo Blockers: • Waiting on Infra for the staging budget (day 3, asked 2×)

Or let your standup write itself

Sill writes Yesterday, Today and Blockers from the work you already do: your git commits on Mac, the tasks you finish and the follow-ups you log. It keeps receipts on what you're waiting on, like the day 6, asked 3× above, and copies the whole thing in one tap from your Mac's menu bar or your iPhone. No account, no server, no analytics.

Get Sill free on the App Store — for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Rather do it by hand? Pull yesterday's commits with one git command, then paste them into the standup generator to clean them up for Slack, Teams or Jira.