Git · Random Bits of Wisdom

Use the Git History to Identify Pain Points in Any Project

Have you heard of Adam Tornhill’s work? If not, I highly recommend that you set some time aside and check out Your Code as a Crime Scene or Software DEsign X-Rays. In both books, the author dives into a bit of an unexplored territory - looking at the evolution of a codebase as a factor of its changes over time. Much of the tooling we use to mitigate tech debt is preventive.

Programming

What’s with the 50/72 rule?

It is part of common sense to assume that the worthiest commit messages lie far from any extremes. Years ago, I often fell in the trap of hastily sending a commit after commit, annoyed by the fact that I have to add a summary to it (let alone a description). I’ve seen many projects whose commit summaries consist primarily of one-word verbs like [FIX], [CLEAN], [TEST], etc. They don’t tell much do they?