Do you have them publicly available somewhere? I'd be interested in that, especially your `next` function telling you which to-do is coming up next without you having to look at _all_ tasks again.
Every day.
Whenever I clock out in the afternoon, I turn it off.
When I want to do private stuff, I turn it on again, and turn it off when I'm done. The only thing with uptime worth mentioning in the house is my Pi Zero running PiHole.
Splitting up commits is totally underrated and seen rarely. I see colleagues over and over again plumbing 4 kinds of changes into the same commit. Good luck reverting the one change that caused an outage.
Crafting good commits is a skill that nobody seems to care about. In fact, nobody really seems to care about learning git at all despite it being one of the main tools in software development.
I would even go as far as "crafting good software is a skill that nobody seems to care about". It feels like people care a lot about "being productive" though, hence tools like all the Copilots.
The incentives are to get the code out the door then improve things later, if it's worth it. There's a lot of risk in product development, it iften doesn't make sense to craft the perfect software when there's a chance that it won't see the adoption that was hoped for.
There is a difference between "crafting the perfect software" and "crafting good software". It is way too common to not realize it and settle on "crafting crappy software" instead. The problem being that crappy software is often very hard to improve later, if it's worth it.
I have lived through multiple examples of this, the biggest one being a bad protocol (that was provably badly designed at the beginning) that got adoption, many tools built around it, and ten years later everybody hates it and keeps complaining but it's so hard to replace because of all the tooling built around it.
Crafting good software and being productive? I guess it depends. I am much slower at producing code than most of my coworkers, but as a result they spend very little time maintaining/debugging it. But I spend most of my time debugging their crap (and they do, too).
I think there is a point to make that better code is often more profitable in the longer term. But the norm (at least where I work) is to swim in crappy code all day and complain about it while producing more of it.
And on this topic, another underrated feature that everyone seems to hate is merge commits.
If you use rebase on your own branch, but merge commits on the stable branch (whatever name you use for it), you get both things:
* Small individual commits with the size and ordering that the original author intended on their branch.
* A "commit group" that describes that set of changes for the sake of future maintainers' sanity, and that can be atomically reverted.
More so in PR-based flows. You can have `git log --first-parent` display only the PR merge commits[1], and `git log --no-merges` display the linear history.
[1]: Assuming you actually put useful info on those commits. If you use GitHub, those merge commits can be set to default to PR title and description.
I also set up recently the policy to only use merge commits on stable branch, as otherwise the path filter^1 in the workflows would not detect correctly which files changed after merging a PR.
> Good luck reverting the one change that caused an outage.
Surely you'd revert to the last good release? I'm sure you could revert a single commit and re-release, but it seems slower (you have to find the right commit to revert, and make sure that the result works correctly) and riskier (since now you're effectively rolling forward to a combination of commits that's never been deployed before)
Not the GP but we tend to use decently small and meaningful commits to make PRs easier to review. They then get squashed, so you can only (easily) revert the whole PR.
Personally I’m happy with that. If the thing merged caused an issue, I’d want to revert the entire thing that was merged, not a subpart of it which would result in a state of the codebase that nobody reviewed.
If you’re very diligent about making good atomic commits that always pass all test that can work, but I find that squashing PRs (and PRs being relatively small) is a very good trade off
Sounds reasonable. Also, when squashing a PR would conflate unrelated commits then maybe those commits should have been separate PRs instead.
I've recently started to like squashing after usually preferring rebase merges, because with squashes I have an easy option to rewrite the commit message and edit out all of those meaningless "fix typo", "improve" and "now actually working" lines...
> I've recently started to like squashing after usually preferring rebase merges, because with squashes I have an easy option to rewrite the commit message
And why couldn't you rewrite the commit messages while rebasing?
EDIT: oh, you mean from the GitHub webUI, I presume. Got it.
> EDIT: oh, you mean from the GitHub webUI, I presume. Got it.
Yes, exactly, while reviewing and merging other peoples PRs. Technically I could still rewrite in other ways, but while squashing in the web UI was the most comfortable workflow.
You're not the only ones, but I can't understand this approach. Do people never then read the version history? It must be impossible to understand commits' diffs with the changes all squashed together.
Not the OP, but I think that the point of squashing every PR is that the reviewers/PR run the whole PR, not the individual commits. If you have a PR with 5 commits, 4 of which break the build and the last one fixes it, then merging that will be a problem if you need to git bisect later.
So the idea is really "what's the point of having a history full of broken state?".
> It must be impossible to understand commits' diffs with the changes all squashed together.
This would be a hint that your PR was too big and addressing more than one thing.
> So the idea is really "what's the point of having a history full of broken state?".
I rebase commits so they don't break the build but the history remains clean and incremental. Selective fixups and so on isn't the same as squashing everything into a single commit.
> This would be a hint that your PR was too big and addressing more than one thing.
I don't think so. Sure, that can be true, but squashes can also simply lose vital history. Suppose you remove a file and then replace it with code copied and modified from another file. If you then squash that, all Git will say is you made a massive edit to the file.
> I rebase commits so they don't break the build but the history remains clean and incremental.
Sure, and that's fine. The idea of the squash workflow is that they don't expect that. It's just different, and that's the rationale behind it :-).
> all Git will say is you made a massive edit to the file.
Which IMO is exactly what happened in this case xD. But again... whatever floats your boat, I was just talking from the point of view of a squash workflow.
> If you have a PR with 5 commits, 4 of which break the build and the last one fixes it, then merging that will be a problem if you need to git bisect later.
And the answer is that you don't; each commit is individually testable and reviewable. Changes requested by reviewers are squashed into the commits and then merged into the project. Unfortunately, while the git command line has "range-diff" to ease review with this workflow, neither GitHub not Gitlab have an equivalent in their UI.
Well, I was obviously meaning that "workflows that squash the commits in a PR are workflows where each individual commit is not tested/reviewed separately".
Of course, if your workflow is different, then... well it is different. Doesn't make the "squash workflows" irrational.
> And the answer is that you don't; each commit is individually testable and reviewable.
How does this work in practice? Is every single atomic commit reviewed by someone? When do they review each of those commits? How many commits typically go into a PR?
> Changes requested by reviewers are squashed into the commits and then merged into the project.
So a reviewer finds the appropriate commit that their comment applies to, and then changes the actual commit itself? Who is the author of the commit at that point?
I'm trying to understand what you're talking about, because you seem to have something figured out, for a problem that every team I've worked on struggles with.
> Is every single atomic commit reviewed by someone? When do they review each of those commits? How many commits typically go into a PR?
1) yes 2) when a PR is submitted 3) it can be a lot for a huge project-wide refactoring, but generally I would say 1 to 5 is typical and up to 20 is not strange.
> So a reviewer finds the appropriate commit that their comment applies to, and then changes the actual commit itself?
No, the author applies the requested change and force-pushes once he has gotten all the requested changes applied.
> because you seem to have something figured out
Thanks! But it's not me—it's how Linux has used git from the beginning, for example. In fact it's the only workflow that is used by projects that still use email instead of GitHub/Gitlab PRs, but (trading some old pain with new pain) it is possible to use it even with the latter. The harder part is marching the review comments to the new patch, which is actually pretty easy to do with emails.
It's quite some work and there's some learning curve. But depending on the project it can be invaluable when debugging. It depends a lot on how much the code can be covered by tests, in particular.
I can only conclude that people who think squashing a work item into a single commit is great have never had to do serious bug hunting, relying on commit history for context, nor have they ever moved forges and lost the context from "the context is in the PR anyway".
I think I've done all those things except forges. I don't know what that one is. I still like squashing. I've wven become the git expert on my team. With squashed PR resolutions, I can more reliably use bisect. Many individual commits were never actually meaningful in the first place.
I think it's a bit of a limited conclusion. Maybe they really just make small PRs that make sense, and maybe they rewrite the commit message into something useful when squashing.
My employer has all PRs merged by a bot once they're approved. The bot takes the PR description and uses that as the commit message. The PR is the unit of change that gets reviewed, not the commit. This makes for a nice linear bisectable history of commits (one per PR) with descriptions, references to issues on our tracker, etc. And no need to worry about force pushing, rebasing, etc, unless you want to do so.
Of course it's got the same end result as doing an interactive rebase & combining all the in-progress commits into a single reviewable unit of change with a good commit message, but it's a bit more automatic.
I have yet to see a good documentation strategy. We have quite some awareness about the problem but I don't see an easy exit.
Currently, we have a similar dumpsterfire running. Project / guideline / bla documentation hanging around in Confluence, technical documentation snippets in git repositories "near" the code they belong, some folks scourging themselves with Sharepoint and there's no solution in sight.
Me and some colleagues have developed quite some tendencies against natural language documentation because it basically becomes stale as soon as you publish it into your org.
