At Teamwork’s Mobile Team we hold a Standup meeting every day, at 11:00 AM Irish Time. That’s Noon for me, here in Spain. And more than a Standup is a “Status Update” to let other members of the Mobile sub-teams know roughly what I’m doing and if I have some errand to run, or won’t be available for several hours, etc. It’s also a good way to keep the connection with the rest of the team. Something specially important when you work 100% remotely from home.

Since my 1st day at Teamwork I got into the habit of writing the bullet points of my standup status update in a Markdown document. This way I just read instead of remembering and stuttering through the Virtual Meeting Software Of Choice. Also, it serves as a handy diary with everything I’ve been doing.

Visual Studio Code showing a preview of my standup document

But you know: each day, open that doc. Add a new section with what I’ve done yesterday and what I want to do today. Fill those. Open the browser. Go to the meeting URL… too much effort. I needed something easier and with less friction. So I decided to write a small script that does all of the above… and a bit more. Right now it even adds the date, the weather at my location and takes a picture using my MBP’s webcam.

You can grab the script in this Github Gist. As always, save it as standup.sh, give it execute permissions chmod a+x standup.sh and run it with ./standup.sh (or put it in your $PATH).

To take the photo using your web cam you’ll need to install imagesnap with brew install imagesnap.

If you’re too lazy to click on the link above, here is also the script:

#!/bin/bash

SU_DATE="## `date "+%d %m %Y (%a)"`"
SU_TEXT1="Yesterday:"
SU_TEXT2="Today:"
SU_TEXT3="---"

# weather info
SU_WEATHER=`curl 'wttr.in/Sevilla?format=3'`

SU_DIR=~/Teamwork/daily-standups
IMG_FILE=$SU_DIR/img/`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`.jpg 

# Add link to that capture in standup file
MD_IMG="![]($IMG_FILE)"

echo "$(echo $MD_IMG; echo $SU_DATE; echo ""; echo $SU_WEATHER; echo ""; echo $SU_TEXT1; echo ""; echo ""; echo $SU_TEXT2; echo ""; echo ""; echo $SU_TEXT3; echo ""; cat $SU_DIR/standup.md)" > $SU_DIR/standup.md

open -a /Applications/Visual\ Studio\ Code.app $SU_DIR/standup.md

# Open Meet (sadly only works properly with Chrome)
open https://meet.google.com/YOUR-MEETING-LINK_HERE -a /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app

# Photo capture
imagesnap -q -w 5 $IMG_FILE