Bad Version Control Hygiene

Well we all care about maintaining personal hygiene similarly we coders should also practice to maintain a good version control hygiene. Sime of us do this and some of us don’t. Her I am going to talk about three such group of people who don’t maintain a good version control hygiene and how these people really screw things up just because they are lazy to type in a few commands which would have otherwise saved them and their peers tons of headache and heartache, but rather they chose to devise their own Frankenstein way of dong things which then takes the form of a multi headed abomination.

Group 1

There is this thing in git known as “branch” which is meant to make life simpler for people working on same functionality or a part of the same application/codebase. The creators of git invented the concept of branch thinking that people would “branch” out the main code base and then work/experiment on the branched-out code so that the original code stays as it was and all other folks who are working on that application/code base can have their sanity preserved and everyone can go home happy, BUT there are some people out there who don’t create their own branch but prefer to work on the same branch as their colleague which then create a scenario of multiple people pushing their respective changes to the same branch. Now, these people don’t do this out of lack of knowledge but just because they think creating separate branches and using git command line as “TEDIOUS”.

Group 2

There is these other group of people who don’t use the git comment section at all. Now, in a team of say 10 people with multiple changes going into the repository everyday there needs to be a better way to communicate, But instead these certain group of people prefer the ancient way of communicating their changes which they have pushed to the version control system through email. I have nothing to say on this, but I salute these group of people for still latching onto their roots and not forgetting the ancient way of doing things.

Group 3

The last group that I am going to talk about are the special ones. These are the unsung heroes in the history of screwing up the basic version control hygiene. Now, typically you should commit the code changes done by you during your end of day by doing these →

• `git add <your files>`
• `git commit -m “<commit message>”`
• `git push`

and then the next day when you start working again on that piece of code, you do this one thing git pull . I want to ask are these four commands so much difficult? it seems that it is for some folks out there who hold off there code till the end of the world and wait for the perfect moment and then they commit their code and meanwhile if there are some updates in the master branch or if somehow the remote branch gets deleted then BOOM! their goes the code down the river. I think you get the picture what I am talking about.

Conclusion

There are many more groups of people who really don’t want to follow a good version control hygiene, but I can not list them all here since it would take me days to talk about each one of these superheroes out there. I am also not saying that anyone is perfect or everyone is not following a good version control hygiene, but there are some crown jewels amongst us who fall into these categories and the whole point of this article was to point it out to you all and to myself not to follow these people.

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