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Summarizing A Week of PRs 📅

Patrick DeVivo

When a project has more than a handful of regular contributors, it can be dificult to see a high level view of all the changes happening. I've felt this recently, even in a codebase that went from just 1 to 3 contributors - there's a lot going on every day, and cutting through the noise to understand the cadence of outward value is difficult.

I've found that using MergeStat to summarize progress has been a useful way to achieve aspects of this. For instance, simply knowing what PRs have merged in the past 7 days has been a valuable summary for us:

-- show me PRs that merged in the past 7 days
SELECT
base_repository_name,
title,
number,
url,
author_login,
created_at,
merged_at
FROM (
SELECT * FROM github_prs('mergestat/mergestat') UNION ALL -- replace with your repo
SELECT * FROM github_prs('mergestat/another-repo') -- can be run across multiple repositories
)
WHERE
merged_at > date('now', '-7 days') -- replace with the time period you care about
AND merged = true

Pull Requests in this context are a sensible "unit of work" (for us) - whereas individual commits or files changed would be far too noisy. This query can be modified to your needs and you can run it with our CLI or in the web app. It uses our GitHub API integration (and will need an auth token).

We run this query in a weekly GitHub action that reports the results to a Slack channel. It's been a cool way to automate a summary of work done across several of our key repositories.

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