History as communication

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Most teams treat git history as a side effect. You work, you commit, whatever ends up in the log is the log. Merge commits pile up. “WIP” and “fix typo” and “actually working now” sit next to meaningful changes. The history is technically accurate but communicates nothing.

The alternative: treat history as something you write, not something that happens to you. The commit log is the one piece of documentation that’s always in sync with the code – because it is the code’s changelog. If the history is incoherent, you’ve wasted that.

Workflow on vnykmshr

History as communication