I was getting a 503 error when trying to use Git. After searching for internet for solutions, I came across this “unicorns have taken over Error – 503“. I wondered what that was all about? Was it one of those stupid error pages some companies do as a joke?
After a bit more searching, I came across another one, Title: “Intermittent angry unicorn”, and it’s clearer what they are on about
“I’ve been subject to the angry unicorn for over a week now.”
That angry unicorn sure does look fierce.
As a developer, you need to “commit” your work into source control. When you do this, you need to provide a message that describes the change. A bug fix or enhancement can consist of a few commits. When you use a source control like Git, you can even “rewrite” the “history” by using squash/rebase commands.
When I am writing code for my job, I often put a bit of thought into the wording to make it clear and professional. If it is for a personal side-project, I sometimes write meaningful messages, but sometimes I may group together multiple fixes, then come up with something generic like “Bug fixes”, or might commit more experimental work-in-progress under a name like “attempt” or “x feature part 1”.
It’s quite frustrating though to see colleagues write generic messages like “bug fix” which doesn’t describe what it is fixing, or how it is fixing it. Seeing messages littered with spelling mistakes is also annoying and unprofessional.
Examples include:
There was a guy who worked in our short-lived Scotland office who sounded like an absolute nutcase and I have never seen someone not take their job seriously like this:
A colleague recently showed me this website https://whatthecommit.com/. I don’t know if they are based on real messages, but it shows you a new message every time you refresh. Most are pretty basic along the lines of “does this work”, but there’s some more outlandish ones if you persevere and refresh many times.
One of my team members recently submitted a change that was labelled “Crash when cancelling out of the dialog”. That describes the bug that he fixed, rather than what he fixed. Another team member provided the following good advice:
The change looks good, but your commit message isn’t describing the change. Could you just reword it so that it completes the sentence “When applied, this commit will…” please. Another way of looking at it is that every commit should read like an instruction in a to-do list. I’d use something like “Return empty collection if user cancels out of the dialog”.
Senior Developer
A stricter idea of commit messages is described here: https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/
One of our Principal Developers loves linking people to this guide https://cbea.ms/git-commit/. One interesting idea is to “Use the imperative mood in the subject line”, whereas most people would write in the past tense.
Having a clear history of file changes helps you when it comes to finding which change caused an issue, and also gives you a better understanding why it changed.
Stranger Coding Tings 