Write Better Commits With Semantic Commits

Writing clear, concise commit messages enable you to work well with any team and get your best work out there.

Good commits can make the difference between a well-maintained product, and a terrible product. Well-written commits following a standardized format will enable viewers of your codebase to easily understand the type of change, what modules it affected, and why it occurred. Below, I will outline my format for commits, based on the Semantic Commits style popularized by the AngularJS team.

Most people don’t start thinking about their commits when they first start development (I get it, there’s a lot going on and a lot to learn)

But commits become especially important when you’re a part of a team.

When you enter a new repository, you want to be able to see how the project has developed over time. If you were to see commits like this:

Fix the thing
Update styles
Add the thing

(Note, these are actually not the worst examples—I’m sure you’ve seen worse)

You likely won’t be able to understand what happened, without reading the code changes in a commit itself.