America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed. -Eleanor Roosevelt, 1936
Yesterday was kind of a crummy day. My back hurt. I forgot paperwork for my son that his daycare needed, which led me to me making two trips to his daycare (don’t worry, I picked up some nice coffee along the way). I had to sit in traffic. There were lots of little things that nagged at me yesterday. However, there was one big thing: I didn’t feel as though I accomplished much.
If you were to look at my commit history for yesterday, you might believe that I actually accomplished many things. You’d be mistaken. My commits were jumbled and incoherent. I wasn’t outlining my thoughts. I didn’t have a clear path. I kept hammering on my keyboard and slamming my head into that proverbial wall, but brute force was failing me. After hitting a teeth-gritting breaking point, the quote above came into my head. Here is my full commit message from when I hit that breaking point:
Nasty Commit to Save Work Attempting to add tests to verify that the link -> entity relationship is working correctly; Cleaning up some stringified keys and using NSStringFromSelector instead.
America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed. -Eleanor Roosevelt, 1936
That commit message makes absolutely no sense (and yes, I actually did include that quote in the message). I was frustrated. That commit touched fourteen files, contained two hundred and seventy-three additions, and disregarded fifty-nine deletions. It was a mess. Quite frankly, I’m ashamed of it.
I have been striving for small, granular commits. I want my commit messages to be concise. If I can fit an adequate description in the title portion of the commit log, that’s even better. This commit was cumbersome. It touched way to many files and made no sense. I can’t even begin to describe what I changed.
Today was much better. My commit history reads like a diary (albeit a confusing diary). I’m improving, but I’m not there yet. I’ve been debating on how I can go about making sense of what I do. Maybe I should keep a diary of what I’ve been working on. This could be beneficial as I encounter problems that seem familiar (Have I encountered these problems before? What did I do last time?) or even help shed light on what I should be doing or the path I should be taking. It would cause me to stop and think about what I’m doing or what I’m trying to accomplish instead of hammering as hard as I can on my keyboard.
