oh god, it’s meSenior developer tip: squash the evidence.
git commit --amend --no-editThis helped me countless times…
Principle developer tip: rewrite history to make yourself seem smarter.
Soft reset the whole branch and commit a series of atomic and semantic patches (eg separating code, test, and refactor changes) that tell a clean narrative of the changeset to reviewers, future blamers.
It’s a picture of the people who submit zero value comment spelling fixes to the Linux kernel so they can claim “I’ve submitted X patches to the Linux kernel” for KPIs or resume building
Oh, you contributed to the kernel? Name every commit SHA.
“Hey Bob, you’ve worked on the Linux kernel before, can you handle this CPU scheduler problem we’re having? Shouldn’t take you too long. We need it done before lunch”
“Nah I was in the network driver section”
“oh nice we’re also having issues with random packets being dropped, can you look into that? It’s business critical”
Listen bub, I don’t have time for this Mickey mouse bullshit!
Hey man, I once had an engineering exec (who didn’t last very long) who decided engineers would be stack ranked by SLOC. You can imagine how easy that metric was to cheese, and you can also imagine exactly how that policy turned out.
Give an engineer a stupid metric to meet, and they’ll find a stupid way to meet it for you, if only out of malicious compliance.
When metrics become targets they fail to be metrics any more
Campbell’s law goes brrrrr.
I’d have a field day with that. Max line length 70 or 75, excessively verbose function and variable names, triple the normal amount of comments, extra whitespace wherever possible, tab width 8, etc. The possibilities are endless for that metric.
Dude… Just write a python script that makes small changes to white space every few seconds and commits them.
Please use Conventional Commits. Simple and easy to use. Plus it is very easy so combine with Versioning techniques like Semantic Versioning.
Any standard that wastes valuable space in the first line of the commit is a hard sell. I don’t see the point in including fix/feat/feat! just for the sake of “easy” semantic versioning because generally you know if the next release is going to be major or minor and patches are generally only only after specific bugs. Scanning the commits like this also puts way too much trust in people writing good commit messages which nobody ever seems to do.
Also, I fucking hate standards that use generic names like this. It’s like they’re declaring themselves the correct choice. Like “git flow”.
You can always adapt to your how repo. But yeah, that’s the point. If you can trust people to make changes on a repo then you should be able to trust them in using some kind of commit structure.
Generic names are probably used in order to crate a familiar, easy to remember, structurized commit format.
The generic name I’m complaining about is “conventional commits”, not “fix” and “feat”
Honestly, I’ve worked with a few teams that use conventional commits, some even enforcing it through CI, and I don’t think I’ve ever thought “damn, I’m glad we’re doing this”. Granted, all the teams I’ve been on were working on user facing products with rolling release where main always = prod, and there was zero need for auto-generating changelogs, or analyzing the git history in any way. In my experience, trying to roughly follow 1 feature / change per PR and then just squash-merging PRs to main is really just … totally fine, if that’s what you’re doing.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that while conv commits are neat and all, the overhead really isn’t really always worth it. If you’re developing an SDK or OSS package and you need changelogs, sure. Other than that, really, what’s the point?
You can always water it down. The point is to have some order in the commits. Otherwise is just messy.
Sometimes I’m in awe at the effort people put into these memes. Well done 😄
P.S Now make one about people who squash 100 commits into one without cleaning up the message and have a single commit with 1k added / 2k removed in it for the sake of “clean” history.
