As a solo founder, I only use git add, commit, push, pull, clone. That's all I need
Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
11–20 of 212 posts
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#12GitHub too is useful for solo work: you can code review your own code.
I’ve found it useful because it’s in a separate context/UI (GitHub web view) as opposed to your code editor or even git diff on command line.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#13I'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…
That has been my pattern for some hobby projects, however it quickly becomes a mess to keep track of what you have done over a period of time (I have the same bad habit, I commit things so I can freexe my code in case I mess something up).
My hobby project has been to extend a program with a new plugin, but then along the way I found bugs in the core code, and I wanted to upstream the fixes (and the plugin). I am very glad I knew what the fixes where, becasue I more or less had to rebase to the original code in order to untangle the mess of commits I made.
I have also found other folks wanting to use my code, so it also made it much more helpful if ourside folks can see how I altered the original program.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#14I 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.
This comment reminds me of writing structured articles: writing structures your thinking. I guess having things in a clear workflow does the same thing.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That has been how I have started to do it. I make a new branch, make a mess of it (until I am finished), then merge it back into the original "golden" branch.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#16I'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…
Some of the sophistication you are 'missing' is there as a solution to scaling problems, to business problems (do you need to track/fix customer/client issues?), or to other problems that may not be as critical for solo devs.
Some of the other is best practices which you are missing out on.
You might want to take a look at what some 'best-practices' are and see which might improve your coding.
Simple things like tagging a commit as "feature/fix/refactor/chore" might make you think differently about your programming workflow. Or you might find it more of a distraction and limitation than a help.
and yes, sometimes you certainly need that 'interim' tag to freeze work. For those rare cases where you run out of time or inspiration before you get to a natural end point of a task.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#17I'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 using this pattern it helps to split out your commits, i’d possible. I do this with changelists in intellij/pycharm.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#18Yea... no.
An overly clean git history for me is a sign of too much perfectionism and greatly reduced productivity.
When I code I usually have a general idea of the stuff I want to include in my branch, but then I stumble upon bugs or code couplings which I need to fix for my feature to work. And then I include the fix into my feature branch, because it's just tedious to switch all the time and create 5 interdependent branches that need to be merged together anyway. Also as long as the feature branch itself is fairly clean then I don't give a rats ass about atomic commits.
And commits having to pass tests is just ludicrous. That's what the tests are for, so you can fix it before merging the branch. Don't go crazy on the commit level..
It depends a bit on the project, and how public it is. But in the end your git history never provides any benefit to customers and doesn't make your code better by itself. I hardly ever rewrite or rebase commits unless there's a good reason for it.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#19I'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…
Even when I use git by myself, I like to use branches. This helps me keep my work separate, and avoids issues if I'm working on one thing but need to do a quick fix elsewhere. I also tend to have anything in master set to go to live, so branching helps keep things that aren't ready from going live. Even if you don't have a "production" environment you push to, making sure your master branch is only code that works well is a good idea IMO.
And as another reply mentioned, squashing commits is good for keeping your history cleaner. My branches tend to have a ton of "fix" commits that get squashed out when merging into master.
Re: Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
#20I'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…
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