Automate boring stuff

Introduction

In my current company all the people who perform creative work (mostly programmers) need to prepare so-called PKUP report. PKUP stands for Podwyszone Koszty Uzyskania Przychodu in the Polish language. It’s legal regulation in Poland, which allows paying a lower income tax due to the particular type of work. For the regular employee, it means that he or she will simply get a bit higher salary per month.

How the report looks in practice?

As a programmer, I simply create software as a source code. Added, removed and modified lines of code in the existing codebase are treated as my creative work. Luckily, we use Git so I can generate *.diff files from the Git repositories I’m contributing to. Besides that, I need to prepare document as a *.docx file with a short description of my work. My tasks look different every month, but report actually looks almost the same every month . Preparing this report is boring and repeatable stuff.

Let’s automate it! Generating *.diff files from Git repos

I simply created a shell script , which goes through predefined project directories and saves *.diff files with names the same as project directory with changes performed by me from 20th day of the last month until now.

Generating *.docx document

Next, I created a python script , which is parametrized and used by shell script. It uses python-docx library for generating *.docx report. I’ve chosen such option, because it’s one of the simplest solutions I’ve found and it’s lightweight. Moreover it can be easily used on Unix systems and integrated with shell scripts.

Personalization

I wanted to make a script available and usable for everyone, so I created .pkup.conf file, which is responsible for personalization and configuration of the script. I think, it looks pretty straighforward.

yDEV_PROJECTS_DIR=$yHYBRIS_SRC
yDEV_PROJECTS_LIST=(backoffice platform-backoffice cockpitng backofficesearch pcm pcmbackoffice cockpit cockpit-core)
yDEV_REPORT_DIR=~/Documents/hybris/pkup/raporty/doc/
yDEV_NAME="Your name"
yDEV_SURNAME="Your surname"
yDEV_ROLE="Software Developer"
yDEV_DEPARTMENT="P&I"
yDEV_MANAGER="Your manager name and surname" Installation and uninstallation

I also created installation script , which allows to start using the scripts faster. Installation script install dependencies for python script, copies shell script and python script into /usr/local/bin/ directory and .pkup.conf file into home directory. Configuration file needs to be adjusted by the user manually after installtion. Of course, there’s another script, which can be used for uninstallation .

Summary

I’ve spent some time for preparing this stuff, but it was fun and I think it should save me and hopefully my co-workers some amount of time during creating reports every month. In the future, it can be improved by automatic generation of report messages and sending data to the server.

Complete solution described in this article with documentation is available on GitHub: https://github.com/pwittchen/pkup .