Great writing is intentional. It considers the needs and expectations of the reader.
Commit messages are writing.
Commit messages are great when they're intentional, considerate of the needs and expectations of the reader.
Who's the reader?
The reader is future you. Or future me. It is colleagues reviewing a Pull Request. It's a release engineer trying to verify and summarize the changes that will go into a release. It's someone troubleshooting trying to find when an unexpected change may have been introduced. It's a team member try to catch up on changes to a product.
Write great commit messages.
That automatic message stub that GitLab generates for you? It's not great.
Update Deployment.md
Don't focus on what file you changed. That's apparent from the substance of the commit, from the diff. Rather, focus on the meaning of what you changed and why you changed it.
Better:
Add checklist step to post in Service Operations channel
This post is less about directly telling you how to do this, and more a place where I can collect annotated links about this.
See also: my Pinboard tag commit_messages.
- Succinct advice about writing commit messages: A Note About Git Commit Messages
- Reinforcing the present-tense imperative norm: Writing Git Commit Messages
- Advice on writing commit messages, and also more generally about composing git commits: How to make good Git commits
Cover photo credit: Photo by NihoNorway graphy on Unsplash
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