Show HN: Simple way to access various statistics in Git repository

You don't have to use it as a measure of productivity. I find running these kinds of stats on my code bases fascinating. This tool looks really neat imho, great work OP.

It dumps branch info too.

Also a good example of how to write a large-ish shell script with a simple user interface. I may use this to combine some smaller related scripts that our team uses.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of GitSense which is working to make software metrics a good thing for both leaders and developers, so assume I have a bias.

> lines of code/number of commits/number of changelog items != productivity

This is the biggest challenge that I'm currently faced with right now, as GitPrime (now Pluralsight Flow), GitHub Insights (formerly Gitalytics), Waydev and others have been very effective at giving the impression that you can easily roll-up metrics to quantify developer productivity. You will be surprised by how many times people want a simple score or a simple graph to summarize how productive a developer is.

What really bugs me about lines of code/number of commits/etc. metrics is they are actually really useful for developers, but because they are used incorrectly, it takes a lot of effort to explain to people that context matters. For example, if I want to know what developers contributed to the src/vs/base directory in the vscode project in the last 30 days, lines of code/number of commits/etc. is quite useful. See the following for an example of what I mean:

https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=path...

If you switch to the impact view, you can quickly tell based on code churn, commits and other metrics who had the greatest impact. I talk a bit more about impact in the following post, so I won't repeat things here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26457072

Right now what I'm working on is making a connected efforts graph that should help management better understand how much effort it takes to develop code, which I'm hoping will displace the notion that you can quantify productivity with low hanging code metrics. For example, when you look at a code change, you should be able to see that it is connected to x number of meetings, x number of emails, x number of code review comments, and so forth.

When it is all over, tracking every line change is a good thing as it benefits everybody, but how it is used today out of convenience is certainly presenting challenges for what I'm working on.

Edit: Do not install my tool as the docker image has an out of date license that I need to update.

Eh, there's a point where commits _could_ be used for metrics, assuming those being monitored are unaware. I dislike the LARP of "oh yeah, it takes me 7 hours to think deeply about the problem of changing this SQL statement, and then one hour and one commit to implement it."

eeeeewwwww no no no no no. Why every cute stat needs to be converted into a metric ot enslave people. Yes, I know, "because that's what managers do". But then I would argue it's in "us" (the programmers) to not let it happen. Yes, I know, "you cannot do that in big corp". Well then, there's no point in complaining either about anything, since we already assume that its a defacto situation, take it for granted and nobody can do anything about that.

Still, as a counterpoint of how this can be fun: When a fellow programmer left the company where I work, the CTO created a small video of the evolution of the services/code based on his commits during time. You could see the different repos popping up and showing his contributions to each during time and growth. Also, since he is (or was) a smoker, he got a zippo engraved with the number of commits and lines of code contributed. Does it mean he was good? He was bad? He did a lot? He did nothing? Noup. Of course, he worked for 5 years in the company, so it was a way to show to him that he contributed a lot and was part of the growth/existence of it, not if he was the most valuable programmer in the team. If you ask me, maybe many of the lines he commited doesn't exist anymore in the current code, still it was a snapshot of what he was for the team and company at that point. And the value was not on the code, but on being part of the team and the process of a company growing.

You can do whatever you want with stats, it's in you if its for good or not.

Another: “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” —-Bill Gates