I'm a 37'ish year old web application developer from South Portland, Maine. I love meeting fellow techies, drop me a line if you want to talk shop.
Posted on 08/28/2008 at 03:51 AM
I began using git to manage the source code for my current project, a Rails app which I should hopefully be launching shortly. Yahoo! Now, I hadn’t actually been using source control for very long before I began, and wasn’t able to focus on best practices. With a wife, 2 kids and 2 jobs, I was lucky to get the coding of the apps themselves under control. That said, its funny now to look back at all my commit messages for this project.
So it wasn’t until recently I was able to focus my commits to specific features, changes to the code-base that stood on their own. More often, I found myself working “everywhere” and on “everything” all at once. I wonder how many other people start off this way.
Well, 127 commits behind me, I took a moment to browse back through the messages of my project. Its amazing to see how useless they are, time to get better at it I guess.
Hey Kevin! Neat idea on integrating the ticket tracker. ciaran from ##textmate on irc also suggested making better use of ‘git commit --amend’ for those silly “ARRRRGGGGG” follow up commits, which will simply combine the next commit with your last one.
Hey, Russ. This post hits close to home, and I think in general it is a symptom (not a bad one necessarily) of those of us who are the only ones committing to a project. I have multiple projects that only I touch and I don’t always commit based on feature implementation or bug fix ... but I know I should, and I know I need to be better as well.
On another note, I was born in Portland and raised in West Enfield, Maine (north of Bangor). Went to college at Thomas College in Waterville, and worked for 2 years in Poland Spring, Maine. I always love coming across the work of other Mainers. Looks like you’re doing some great stuff!!
Thanks Jason! I moved to portland from the Camden area to be around more tech related people. I’ve met a ton of nice folk via our local Ruby Users Group. Hit me up if you’re ever in the area, we’ll trade stories. I went to Colby College not far away from Thomas!
Colby ... we used to bet our asses handed to us by Colby in Baseball and Soccer on a somewhat regular basis!
Half of mine are something vague like “cleanup.”
LOL. I read this and laughed because this is EXACTLY what my commit log messages look like on my current solo project. Glad to see I’m not the only one out there that does this.
I was actually searching google for a way to go back through and join old commits together and recomment them so I could get rid of all this. I think I may be able to accomplish this with git rebase—still investigating.
Enjoy a sample of some of my recent commit messages
Ahaha, so bad:
32c6dd4 The money!
df9906a Trim
b1b3fe2 5
cb41bdd ,
9fef413 CONVERT
66ec32c Signed
fc101c8 Test
f2bab34 Test
748c565 Test
33da1f6 Test
31600cc Test
c814695 Test
a3d7c6d Testing sqk
ef6fce6 New SQL
50e5800 clear size
b2cf217 typoe
074380f typo
7da9f97 test
29bc54a got rid of P
905bd76 fixing
bfc9ddf fixing
961d4fb style test
9b96c24 test
2a91b56 test
21500dd >=
ae6e888 unfixed
eef0008 -1
b87037f Fixing
bb5bec1 TEST
8446be6 match
5e772a9 Changed
ca4ee6e Change to next page
e56bdc0 changed to 6
82e82a5 +1
af859cd Floor
5e7ac25 fixed bug
b7fdfe5 Pages
3390ede Fixed search query
12c7be4 Fixed ULs
13d6ee4 list tyle
46e4ef2 LI~!
I’m sure these all made sense at the time :D
@Garrett ... awesome, thanks for the validation
Often times I will release code for free or go that extra distance to help others online. If my skills were useful to you, please consider a small donation. Thank you very much.
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@ calendaraboutnothing
Foundation's Edge, RJones Family, We're Not.com (only for staging), Ailee Jones (same as rjones for now)
Aaron, Barnaby, Brian, Chris, Dirk, Frank, Four, Justin, Matt, Mike, Monty, Paul, Sean, Travis
I can usually be found lounging on irc.freenode.net while I work, on the following channels: #fauna, #github, #hello-heroku, #jquery, #passenger, #ruby, #rubyonrails, #slicehost, #sproutcore, #textmate, #werenot.
I often find myself having the same problem. After a long coding + testing (or testing + coding depending on your bent), meaningful commit messages are always tough.
If you use a ticket tracking system, it might be good to add a pre-commit hook to require a reference to an active ticket (We haven’t done this yet, but I’m considering it...)