HD-101 — The first pull request

Builds: nothing. Teaches: why the next six tickets exist.

The ticket

Add a feature to the helpdesk CLI. Don't push to main — open a pull request.

What you do

git switch -c hd-101-priority-filter
# ... write the code ...
git add -A
git commit -m "feat: filter tickets by priority"
git push -u origin hd-101-priority-filter

gh pr create --base main --head hd-101-priority-filter \
  --title "HD-101: filter tickets by priority" \
  --body "Adds --priority to the list command."

Then merge it.

What actually happened

The PR merged. Green tick, satisfying. And nothing had checked anything.

There were no tests running, no required reviewers, no status checks. The PR was a
change of scenery, not a gate. Anyone could have merged anything.

That is the entire point of this ticket. You are supposed to feel how empty it is.

The two words that cause the most confusion

Every PR has a base and a head:

Word	Means
base	Destination. Where the code lands.
head	Source. Where the code comes from.

--base main --head hd-101-priority-filter reads: this branch ends up in main.

Get these backwards and you will open a PR proposing to merge main into your
feature branch, which looks almost right and is completely wrong. It happens to
everyone at least once. It happened here — see mistakes.md.

Also: a PR's head has nothing to do with git's HEAD pointer. Same word,
unrelated meanings. Git's HEAD is "where I am standing right now"; a PR's head is
"the branch being proposed".

What to look at before moving on

Open the merged PR and look at the checks section. It's empty. Remember that.

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Next: HD-102 — Continuous integration

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originally published at https://github.com/nazmur96/git-promotion-ladder/blob/main/docs/hd-101-first-pull-request.md