Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
1–10 of 212 posts
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#2I'm also a solo developer and use git in a much less sophisticated fashion. I tend to use it as, "freeze my code here, so in case I f something up, I can get back to a moderately clean state." It's kind like a snapshot-based local history. And, quite frankly, I rarely revert one, but it makes me feel safer. I don't care if I have a lot of commit messages that say, "interim". The good ones are clear.
Is this a terrible coding practice? I don't have enough non-me experience to know what an anti-pattern this probably is. I probably won't change my process, but I'm curious.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#3I'm also a solo developer and use git in a much less sophisticated fashion. I tend to use it as, "freeze my code here, so in case I f something up, I can get back to a moderately clean state." It's kind like a snapshot-based local history. And, quite frankly, I rarely revert one, but it makes me feel safer. I don't care if I have a lot of commit messages that say, "interim". The good ones are clear. Is this a terribl…
I thought I was the only one using guy like this.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#4I'm also a solo developer and use git in a much less sophisticated fashion. I tend to use it as, "freeze my code here, so in case I f something up, I can get back to a moderately clean state." It's kind like a snapshot-based local history. And, quite frankly, I rarely revert one, but it makes me feel safer. I don't care if I have a lot of commit messages that say, "interim". The good ones are clear. Is this a terribl…
Just squash the junk commits with rebase when you are done. It keeps the history clean and you have many points to revert to.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#5I'm also a solo developer and use git in a much less sophisticated fashion. I tend to use it as, "freeze my code here, so in case I f something up, I can get back to a moderately clean state." It's kind like a snapshot-based local history. And, quite frankly, I rarely revert one, but it makes me feel safer. I don't care if I have a lot of commit messages that say, "interim". The good ones are clear. Is this a terribl…
If it works for you it's fine. I used Git in different ways depending on the projects, on some solo projects I do like you say (similar to saving a game to be able to go back). For some other solo projects (with a longer lifespan or more critical) I follow Gitflow and I am more strict with the process.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#6I'm also a solo developer and use git in a much less sophisticated fashion. I tend to use it as, "freeze my code here, so in case I f something up, I can get back to a moderately clean state." It's kind like a snapshot-based local history. And, quite frankly, I rarely revert one, but it makes me feel safer. I don't care if I have a lot of commit messages that say, "interim". The good ones are clear. Is this a terribl…
Pretty much what I do too, even working in collaborative projects. Once nice thing about git is that it makes it easy to go back and clean up your history with rebase before publishing it to others, so you can make as big of a mess as you want in your local branches without anyone else having to see it.
So yes, having "interm" or "wip" commits would be an anti-pattern in a shared repo, as it makes it harder for others to see what changes you made. For a local branch though; not a big deal.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#7I'm also a solo developer and use git in a much less sophisticated fashion. I tend to use it as, "freeze my code here, so in case I f something up, I can get back to a moderately clean state." It's kind like a snapshot-based local history. And, quite frankly, I rarely revert one, but it makes me feel safer. I don't care if I have a lot of commit messages that say, "interim". The good ones are clear. Is this a terribl…
I don't think it's an antipattern if you're working by yourself. As you said, it's a safety net that helps your confidence in case something does go wrong. The only thing I'd recommend changing might be to make your commit messages a tiny bit more detailed, even for the interim commits - that way you know what's going on at each commit if you do have to eventually do a `git bisect` to hunt down a regression.
Going a step further and rebasing interactively to tidy up your logs would also accomplish the same goal, but if it's just for your own eyes, it's probably not worth the time.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#8I'm also a solo developer and use git in a much less sophisticated fashion. I tend to use it as, "freeze my code here, so in case I f something up, I can get back to a moderately clean state." It's kind like a snapshot-based local history. And, quite frankly, I rarely revert one, but it makes me feel safer. I don't care if I have a lot of commit messages that say, "interim". The good ones are clear. Is this a terribl…
Absolutely nothing wrong with this if you are developing solo. As suggested by a sibling comment, you can always squash if you are looking for a cleaner history, though this is probably isn't necessary if you are never going to share your code. If you are going to share and your important commits are clean, then it's easy to squash.
Another good trick trick is to simply stage things to "freeze" them—You can then `git checkout` any changed files if you want to revert to the staged state. This is useful if you are in working state without a lot of changes but want to run a quick experiment before committing.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#9I have a quite strict solo-SCM workflow as well (including PRs!).
The reason is that the SCM is not just a tool - the history of the codebase follows the thought process of the developer.
More structured history == more structured thinking. Cleaner history == cleaner thinking.
Documentation (traceability etc.) is certainly a benefit, but in this sense, it's part of the smaller picture.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#10I'm also a solo developer and use git in a much less sophisticated fashion. I tend to use it as, "freeze my code here, so in case I f something up, I can get back to a moderately clean state." It's kind like a snapshot-based local history. And, quite frankly, I rarely revert one, but it makes me feel safer. I don't care if I have a lot of commit messages that say, "interim". The good ones are clear. Is this a terribl…
Pretty much what I do too, even working in collaborative projects. Once nice thing about git is that it makes it easy to go back and clean up your history with rebase before publishing it to others, so you can make as big of a mess as you want in your local branches without anyone else having to see it. So yes, having "interm" or "wip" commits would be an anti-pattern in a shared repo, as it makes it harder for other…
So maybe that's the idea for my projects that I make available to others. Be a bit more deliberate with branches, allow them to be junky, and clean up when I merge to master. That seems like the best of both worlds with minimal effort. I think I'll even try it.