Simon Willison’s Weblog

Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat (via) Rachel Kroll describes a neat hack for companies with an internal LDAP server or similar machine-readable employee directory: run a cron somewhere internal that grabs the latest version and diffs it against the previous to figure out who has joined or left the company.

I suggest using Git for this—a form of Git scraping—as then you get a detailed commit log of changes over time effectively for free.

I really enjoyed Rachel’s closing thought: “Incidentally, if someone gets mad about you running this sort of thing, you probably don’t want to work there anyway. On the other hand, if you’re able to build such tools without IT or similar getting ”threatened“ by it, then you might be somewhere that actually enjoys creating interesting and useful stuff. Treasure such places. They don’t tend to last.”