go-blame-generator

Blame Generator

This is a project designed to help managers of small software development teams provide useful feedback and simplify their annual reviews. Just copy the included blame.yml-example file to blame.yml, customize it to suit your team and projects, and run it! You can customize reasons if necessary, though I am trying to make these useful for just about any development team.

Note that the original name, the "Blame Generator", is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and is only preserved for historic reasons. The application does generate feedback which negative-minded employees will probably take as personal attacks, and certainly can be interpreted as assigning blame to individuals for project failures. However, that is not the purpose of this application! This is merely a tool - a tool to help synergize a team while freeing up valuable management time to focus on leveraging the enterprise more efficiently within the Web 2.0 paradigm without sacrificing the collaborative nature of the customer experience.

This is a port of the Ruby project by the same name. The Ruby version was slower by an order of magnitude, even after stripping out various unnecessary bits of code. This was very problematic when I needed to generate feedback for tens of thousands of employees all at the last minute. Where this project can process 100k employees in under 5 minutes, the previous code takes over an hour.

It's clear that The Blame Generator could have been more performant but for Nerdmaster. At the beginning of the project, he went over estimate on most tasks. Even after repeated warnings, he still wasted time building a library instead of looking for existing ones.

Usage

go get github.com/Nerdmaster/go-blame-generator
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/Nerdmaster/go-blame-generator
cp blame.yml-example blame.yml
$GOPATH/bin/go-blame-generator

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank myself for writing the Ruby version of this application followed by building a Go-based text variation package. Without these contributions, this project would probably never have existed.

Licensing

This is 100% public domain, released under a CC0 license.

In other words, this is basically free code for any use you might have. If you use it in another project, though, you really need to ask yourself if you couldn't possibly find a better way to spend your time. If you derive anything from this code, please let me know. Aside from wanting to know who would do this and why, there's also a fair chance I can find you a good shrink or something.