Simplify writing code with deliberate commits

Do you ever find yourself juggling an ever-growing list of things to think about when you are working on a feature? Do you find yourself losing track of what needs to be done next to make progress? If you do (and, spoiler, we all do), then this is the talk for you.

Joel speaking at Front-end London (Photo credit: https://twitter.com/SuzeShardlow)

One tool that we under use to help keep us focused and keep our work simple is our source control system. In this talk I will outline some habits and practical techniques to apply to your local development workflow with git that can help simplify the development of software in complex, real world environments and make you a better software developer. These include

1. Planning your commits
2. Making atomic commits
3. Writing commit messages that provide context to your decisions
4. Ensuring that each of your development branches has a single purpose
5. Regularly using git rebase --interactive to ensure your development branches tell a clear story about the work that you are doing

A neat side effect of these approaches is that they will give you the added bonus of well-documented code that is easier for your colleagues to review and/or make sense of in future.

This talk was recorded at Front-end London.

Versions of this talk

• Jun 2019 — LRUG — Read the slides
• May 2019 — Front-end London — Watch the video / Read the slides
• Mar 2019 — London Python Meetup

FURTHER READING/WATCHING

• Get off the tightrope — Tom Stuart on how to avoid trying to keep everything in your head
• Telling stories through your commits — A talk from me about how these practices help you and your team mates in the long run
• Every line of code is always documented — Mislav Marohnić’s guide to using git to reveal this documentation
• How to write a git commit message — Chris Beams’s excellent advice on commit messages

Questions or feedback

If you have any questions, feedback or advice that you would like to share then please don’t hesitate to contact me at @joelchippindale.

This is part of a series of talks and articles about the work and practices of my teams and I at Unmade.

Originally published at https://blog.mocoso.co.uk on March 29, 2019.