Commit early, commit often

Eduardo Lisboa — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 19:23:11 +0000

Introduction

It has been commonplace that people are kind of afraid of commiting. It's not rare to see big, heavy changes in one single commit. And this is not good, since it will not be easy to code review.

There are many, many ways to improve commits, and this goes through two simple tips: standardize your commits and create more branches. Let's talk about them a bit.

Standardize your commits

It is very important to have a standard for message commits, because it makes it easier to read, as well as to reuse them. We only need to change specific details, depending on the changes being made.

It works better when there's already a chosen flow, which is generally previously agreed with other team members. There are many options available, and lately I have been using gitmoji.dev as an add-on to them.

Create more branches

Maybe because of subversion, people think that branching may create some overhead on the project. But that is not true. I see branching, along with git messages as part of the documentation. They must explain directly what is being done.

If a feature branch is created and two people are working on that, tasks must be defined and each (sub) branch should be created for each person. Then, one approves the changes of the other and vice-versa.

Conclusion

Regarding the commits, along with standardization, I also like to commit empty changes using git commit --allow-empty to mark the beginning of a branch, or some intermediate and important point. I even commit broken or incomplete code this way!

git commit --allow-empty -m":boom: going to lunch, incomplete code is pending bugfix on feature WorldDomination"

Branching per se may lead to a "branch hell" problem, but only if they are not properly managed. A branch must be created and then, when it's purpouse is reached, the pull request (or merge request) must be created, approved or rejected and them the branch must be deleted.

And that's it. If you have any doubts or suggestions, let me know in the comments below.

Cheers,

Don't panic when using CLI

Eduardo Lisboa — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 11:23:05 +0000

Intro

When using the Command Line Interface, we often find a few long and / or confusing commands. And this post intends to ease the pain of getting along with that.

When things start to get complicated, there are some things that can be done. In this post, we are talking about three of them:

Aliases
Functions
Comments

Development

Aliases

An alias is exactly what it means: a nickname. It is very useful when running commands that take too much arguments. For example:

alias lah=ls -ltrah

Now, when running the lah command, it will be exactly like running ls -ltrah.

Functions

A function is probably the best way to run a group of commands. When adding a if or a for statement, it gets even more interesting. Let's suppose we want to connect to a server which is still being provisioned or rebooted:

function keeptrying() {
    until $@
    do
        sleep 1
        echo -e "Trying to run $1 again"
    done
}

Now, this function can be called like this:

keeptrying ssh myserver -l myuser

Due to the until statement, this function will keep trying forever to run any command given, until it is successful. Possibilities are infinite, limited only by our imagination. Be creative.

Comments

This resource is more useful when searching for commands on history logs. While aliases can be useful to shorten a complex command, comments can be useful in another way: finding those damn complex commands. When relying on CLI, a lot of useful commands are run and often revisited. For this, we can use Control + R and start typing the command we want to find. But... what if we could search for it's description instead of the command itself? Very useful when we can't even remember the command, isn't it?

All we have to do is:

ls -ltrah # list hidden files

Now, we can revisit this command by pressing Control + R and typing list hidden files, or even only hidden. Pressing Control + R again will show the next other search result. Pretty neat, isn't it?

Conclusion

There are plenty of things we can do by mastering such techniques. As said before, the most important thing is to be creative. First, start by playing with these guys until getting used to them. Then, start doing real things that will change your life forever.

Hope to have helped.

Cheers.

DEV Community: Eduardo Lisboa

Commit early, commit often

Introduction

Standardize your commits

Create more branches

Conclusion

Don't panic when using CLI

Intro

Development

Aliases

Functions

Comments

Conclusion