Reflect on past commits

Two minute tip

Photo by Yancy Min on Unsplash

One of Abletech’s Team Values is Continuous Improvement. We believe in getting better at what we do, a little bit more, every day. We are committed to ‘do the right thing’ and always leave a codebase in better shape than we found it.

Programming is all about writing code that is easy to understand. Why? Developers write code but, most importantly, developers read code. A lot of it. Reading code that is hard to understand is frustrating, scary and slows down productivity.

Can you understand your old code?

Let’s face it, any new commit is likely to add a bit of technical debt. You probably already get code reviews but they can be rushed by a deadline, or overlooked because it was too long. You could even argue that your pull request was merely a draft that is waiting to be improved. So, why not be proactive and reflect on your past commits?

I invite you to put your version of the #iwrote function in your terminal startup file. When you need a small break, take 2 minutes to reflect on what you wrote “1 month ago” or “6 months ago” or “1 year ago”.

# ~/.zshrc

iwrote() { git log --until=$1 -n ${2:-3} --author="$(git config user.email)" --pretty="%H" | xargs git show }

# usage:
# iwrote "1 year ago"
# iwrote "6 months ago" 4

The function above takes two parameters, both from the git log command. The first parameter is a period that can be used in the until option of git log. The second is an optional number of commits that defaults to 3 when skipped.

Just like listening to your voice, or watching a recorded video of yourself, reading your past commits can be cringy. However, it is also a powerful way to improve your craft.

Things you can ask yourself while reading past commits:

Is the change easy to understand? What could make that change better? Is this commit message helping understand the change? Is this commit intent clear enough? Is the change worth having a dedicated commit or could it have been squashed with another one? Has my coding style evolved? In what way and why?

Why not try it? Make it fun. It will only take two minutes.