Ben Halpern

Posted on Apr 13, 2022

How do you use git when working solo?

#discuss #git #productivity

Oldest comments (67)

Sherry Day • Apr 13 '22

Poorly

Raunak Ramakrishnan • Apr 13 '22

For solo projects, I use git as a journal using meaningful commit messages and to mark "save points" where I know the code is working fine. I use git tags as a memorable way to mark the aforementioned good commits. I do not make as much use of branches as I should because it is easy to checkout to a safe commit using tags.

Nissi Lawrence Kazembe • Apr 18 '22

Interesting usage, I will definitely adopt this. Quite a handy debugging method especially for side projects.

Ben Halpern • Apr 13 '22

Personally — I rarely branch off of main while working solo, but I do maintain high standards of committing regularly with good messages.

That's high level, but would love to hear a few more detailed answers from folks!

Renan Franca • Apr 13 '22

I do the same. But I started to create branches to be committed to releasing a new version to myself 😅. So doesn't feel like an endless project 😆

Dendi Handian • Apr 14 '22

pretty much the same

Rubin • Apr 14 '22

I second you Ben. I do maintain some quality commit messages following the conventional commit. That would help me in future track what went wrong and on which commit rather than scratching my head for an hour or two

Yechiel Kalmenson • Apr 14 '22

I generally don't branch off main unless I'm doing a long and fairly involved feature. Mainly so it should be easy to throw the work away if it turns out to be too hard or too long to keep working on.

leob • Apr 15 '22

Same for me - using it essentially in the same way but rarely using other branches than master.

Tyler V. • Apr 13 '22

For some of my earlier work projects, I have a dev, test, and prod branch set up and do the full dev > test > prod deployment cycle - although now that the main rollout is done and it's mostly small maintenance updates I don't have users do a proper testing of the test branch any more.

For newer projects I've been using a single branch and only branching if I want to do a major overhaul update - for example I overhauled the CSS to use Tailwind of one and I did that all in a side branch so that I could make sure they were okay with the minor changes before committing to prod 😅

Arsala Khan • Apr 13 '22

I try to commit important checkpoints so if something breaks I can check the log and do a hard reset to the last commit that worked. Since I enjoy finding creative ways to refactor code, this is super useful if I go down the won't refactoring path.

I don't stress too much about being religious with feature branches. I let the feature branches evolve naturally with the project.

Rebecca DuPont • Apr 13 '22

I use git for organizational purposes when working solo. I don't really stem off the main branch, but the commenting and commit notes help to keep my multiple projects organized and remind me where I was when I last left off. Overall, I think it's good practice to practice how you would work in a team environment, so I do not do sloppy messages when committing.

Rohith V • Apr 13 '22 • Edited

While working solo, I will try a bunch of things like creating different branches, merging them, seeing the green getting darker in my contribution bar😂, good commit messages.
And moreover I am trying to get more comfortable using different commands and the errors that get popped up.
I mainly use it for learning purpose.

Thomas Bnt • Apr 13 '22

Always two branch for features : main and dev, but I can work direclty to the main if is a small changing.

Tawhid • Apr 13 '22

I use meaningful commit messages with checkpoint(like #1 or similar).While I push to a test branch and if everything is okay I merge it with the main branch.I sometimes use git tags.

All of this is true unless I'm working on a personal project .-.