Vacation Planning for Geeks

Managing a team involves a lot of routine stuff that dev’s like us are lazy to take care of. Recently I came across a situation where managing my teams vacations , keeping a track of how my resources are allocated etc became overwhelming. The current process was mostly trough emails and a few paper forms ( I know quite old school right ). I just couldn’t handle it. Initially I was interested in a tool thats integrated with Slack since slack does quite anything now. But paid plans , its difficult to convince management. Specially when they like how its done already.

So then I started looking into options that are available. I came across an interesting article where a remote team was using git to manage vacations. I found this quite interesting but none of their tools were open for the public. So after some thought I came up with a structure that would help me do something similar. I proposed a structure in which each of my staff has there own yaml file which contains leaves for a particular year.

The folder structure looked like the following :

- /
 
  - Readme.md
  - GayanHewa
    - 2015.yml
    - 2016.yml

File content of the yaml file :

---
 - name: Gayan Hewa
   joined: 01/01/2014
   2016:
    - date: 01/01/2016
      days: 01
      reason: Personal 

Current flow involves members sending a pull request when they want to take leave , plan vacations etc Appropriate team leads would approve/reject the pull request.

Going ahead we plan to write a script that would validate and parse all yaml files when a pull request is made. And generate a summary file etc