[HN Gopher] How to end up with 500k commits in your log
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How to end up with 500k commits in your log
Author : benhoyt
Score : 82 points
Date : 2021-06-18 23:28 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.arp242.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.arp242.net)
| snicker7 wrote:
| tl;dr
|
| > Almost all of the company consisted of very junior people,
| often with no experience outside of that company.
|
| Lesson to learn: there is a reason why experienced coders cost
| more.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Quote: "Two people working on the same file at the same time was
| ... unwise."
|
| Yep, that one! That's the one that cracked me up, waking my wife
| from her afternoon nap :).
| nosajm wrote:
| I am working with a client today, in 2021, that still has
| multiple developers making live changes to a dev server as part
| of their everyday development process.
|
| Some of them make their changes locally in VS Code (or
| Notepad), FTP the changed files to their home directory, then
| sudo cp to replace the existing files. Others SSH into the
| server and directly edit files using vi.
|
| Due to that workflow, none of those devs ever use a proper
| debugger (and have committed a lot of random console logging)
| and there are often conflicts when more than one person is
| working on a file. To address that, there is a Slack channel
| dedicated entirely to announcing what file you are working on.
| patorjk wrote:
| > One of the developers could not code at all. ... Nice guy
| though; he was a lot of fun. Just a bad choice of careers (or
| maybe not, since his salary was a lot higher than mine...)
|
| I've known a few people like this. One guy told me he realized
| programming wasn't for him after he'd been out in the real world
| for a year or so, but it just paid so much he didn't know what to
| do. I know another guy who just goes job to job and lasts about 6
| months to a year before getting axed. He's able to do it because
| there's just so much demand in the market.
| bgroat wrote:
| I have this rails app that behaves really weird on Heroku, where
| _every_ build fails the first time.
|
| So I have a comment "Commit comment" in my html that I adjust a
| capitalization on then push again.
|
| Works 100% of the time
|
| I expect to end up in the 500k commits club
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Reminds me of another part of OP:
|
| > No one liked how any of this worked, but just accepted it as
| a fact of life, like how you would accept that it really sucks
| that it rains today. That's an attitude I've seen more often
| and never really understood: if I see something that's really
| awkward, frustrating, and time-consuming then I want to fix it,
| but a lot of people seem happy to just and accept it.
| pjerem wrote:
| I think it's more like << this place is full of smart people
| that knows this is shit so if nobody fixed it already, it
| must be hard to fix >>.
|
| And since this is a shared behavior, even your potential fix
| can be hard to get reviewed because everyone will be afraid
| of the potential side effects because nobody understands why
| it even worked like this.
| lambdaba wrote:
| Just use "git commit --amend --allow-empty", no need to change
| anything!
|
| Edit: this is mixing up two things, what you want in this case
| is "git commit --amend -C HEAD && git push -f", i.e. replace
| the current commit with a new hash and force push.
|
| Alternatively you can create an empty commit as above, but that
| isn't amending.
| pjerem wrote:
| And yet our field is called Software << Engineering >>.
| breakingcups wrote:
| Seems like an issue on Heroku's end really, maybe some build
| dependency timeout which is then cached or something. At any
| rate, I'd either dig in or contact Heroku, I couldn't imagine
| leaving that lie without knowing the cause.
|
| Often, the root cause of this will bite you hardest when you
| need it least.
| cerved wrote:
| > And if stuff is awkward then ... maybe you're doing it wrong?
| No one liked how any of this worked, but just accepted it as a
| fact of life, like how you would accept that it really sucks that
| it rains today. That's an attitude I've seen more often and never
| really understood: if I see something that's really awkward,
| frustrating, and time-consuming then I want to fix it, but a lot
| of people seem happy to just and accept it.
|
| so much this
| wdb wrote:
| > One of their websites was a "website builder", like Geocities,
| except worse. The value for the customers was that was in Dutch,
| with Dutch support (it didn't even support English.[2] Shortly
| before I joined they decided to rewrite it from scratch (which in
| this case was probably the right decision by the way).
|
| Or people just want to do the work in their mother tongue instead
| of a foreign language. Personally, it's quite disappointing to
| the see Englishification of The Netherlands. Even been to
| restaurants were I couldn't even speak in Dutch in Amsterdam and
| had to order in English. Bloody ridiculous. I don't think you
| will see that happen in London.
|
| Depending on the kind of work I prefer to do things in Dutch,
| English or German. Anything mathematics is something I prefer to
| read about in Dutch, while some social science or anthropology
| related subjects I prefer to read in German.
| nemetroid wrote:
| I don't think the article is dismissing the value of
| internationalization. As the endnote says:
|
| > People often seem dismissive of that value i18n, "everyone
| speaks English" Well, depends on who your customer base is.
| Even in the Netherlands where almost everyone speaks some
| English there are still loads of people who are not especially
| good at it and much more comfortable with Dutch. This is
| probably over half the population, and it's really not just old
| people.
| renewiltord wrote:
| > > _The value for the customers was that was in Dutch, with
| Dutch support (it didn't even support English_
|
| > _Or people just want to do the work in their mother tongue
| instead of a foreign language_
|
| These two sentences mean the same thing. While sometimes people
| say "or X" to reword X I don't see why you'd do that. It's
| clear as it is.
| wdb wrote:
| Yes, I am aware of that. Just wanted to express my opinion.
|
| For example, Netflix is doing a bad job at providing Dutch
| subtitles. Barely any tv show has Dutch subtitles. Disney+
| does a much better job.
| arp242 wrote:
| I think you completely misread what I wrote; the entire point
| was that it being in Dutch was valuable (in spite of being a
| very mediocre to crappy product in every other way).
| Kiro wrote:
| It's not hard. I use git add ., git commit -m "asdfghj", git push
| as my save. Exactly like I press Cmd+S in Photoshop all the time.
| So naturally I end up with a ridiculous amount of commits.
| cerved wrote:
| why bother with a message if it's just garbage?
| lorlou wrote:
| Because a message is mandatory to be able to make a commit.
| Manozco wrote:
| git commit --allow-empty-message
|
| https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit#Documentation/git-
| commit...
| samhain wrote:
| Someone above mentioned:
|
| git commit --amend --allow-empty
| majewsky wrote:
| --allow-empty refers to the changeset [1]. You still need
| a message.
|
| [1] To be precise, it allows to create a commit that has
| the same tree as the parent commit.
| cobbal wrote:
| That can be fixed by using "EDITOR=true git commit
| --amend --allow-empty"
| [deleted]
| mzs wrote:
| I use 'wip' (work in progress) and it makes it easy to find
| those save my work commits.
| nanis wrote:
| My principle has always been "commit early, commit often" and
| "push early, push often". This works well when you do your work
| in a branch and you only "squash and merge" into the main
| branch (even if you are the sole developer on the project).
| stinos wrote:
| Works extremely well indeed. Like git was basically made to
| be used like this. However, only because of that 'squash and
| merge' aka 'sculpt a nice history with the emphasis on story'
| bit. Not doing that is in my opinion and experience
| completely useless for code. As far as I'm concerned there's
| hardly any difference between one commit with message 'fixes'
| introducing a 1k loc diff code dump or 1000 commits
| introducing a one-line diff: a proper git history is a joy to
| work with when figuring out bugs and why/how things were done
| the way they are. Anything else is just mediocre at best,
| usually just worthless. Which I learned the hard way
| obviously.
| piva00 wrote:
| > However, only because of that 'squash and merge' aka
| 'sculpt a nice history with the emphasis on story' bit. Not
| doing that is in my opinion and experience completely
| useless for code.
|
| A thousand times this, I use `git log` as a debugging and
| learning tool, if I can find the exact commit that
| introduced a change that I don't really understand why or
| how was done I resort to looking into git's history to
| figure it out.
|
| I hate when developers don't put an effort to tell the
| story of "why" you are doing what you did. The most common
| failure is just listing down the changes done in the code
| (the ones you can just read with `git diff`), I hate that.
|
| I treat git's history as a breadcrumb trail, I leave as
| many breadcrumbs as I can on my commits so others can find
| the trail later on: JIRA ticket reference, background of
| the change, why a refactoring is being done, what I found
| during the refactoring that made it end with a strange
| design, why the documentation needed to be edited, etc.
| Whatever I can think that would make my life easier in 1-2
| years time if I ever had to read `git log` I try to leave
| for my future colleagues...
| stinos wrote:
| _The most common failure is just listing down the changes
| done in the code (the ones you can just read with `git
| diff`), I hate that_
|
| Exactly. But I have noticed for some people this seems
| just really hard, don't know why exactly. Even after
| repeating and explaining the same thing (git commits,
| just like comments in code, should explain _why_ , not
| _what_ , the _what_ can be inferred from the code and if
| not the code is usually not very good) I see people
| struggling with coming up with an acceptable explanation
| in full sentences of why a change was made.
| abhinav22 wrote:
| I won't lie, I keep using commits as the equivalent to saving,
| and hence have many commits on my GitHub Profile (2,000 in the
| last year - many for me, I guess some have much more).
|
| At some point I got addicted to the number, so from time to time
| I try to manually increase my frequency of commits.
|
| All that said, I end up doing more commits when working on front
| end stuff, when I doing back end programming, I am not at all
| interested in saving / committing frequently as I'm focused on
| the task at hand. With front end stuff, you necessarily need to
| save and refresh the webpage in your development browser, so it
| goes hand in hand with increasing my commits :-)
| piva00 wrote:
| Do you use `git stash`? I don't understand your workflow, do
| you commit to keep a log of your whole line of thought? As in:
| with your mistakes or failed designs/approaches being
| backtracked (overwritten/removed, etc.) and keeping an
| immutable sequence of your line of reasoning?
|
| For me, commits of work in progress are only done on my
| development branches before I want to push to a remote to save
| my work in case of my computer failing (or getting lost/stolen,
| whatever force majeure), I usually write a "WIP: <what's been
| worked on>" message that I will squash later on when I have a
| meaningful commit.
| zatarc wrote:
| Just use (feature-)branches.
|
| You can commit every single character if you in the mood. At
| the end, when your new feature is complete, you just squash all
| commits in this branch to one single commit ("add feature xyz")
| and merge/rebase it to your main dev branch.
|
| Now it is really easy to identify the actual code behind a new
| feature.
| williesleg wrote:
| How to get 20 comments on hacker soy boy bog.
| u801e wrote:
| This reminds me of another story about an unorthodox way of using
| SVN https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-inner-json-effect
| bokchoi wrote:
| This is amazing, thank you.
| robtaylor wrote:
| "A lot of times the concerts weren't sold out at all, but we
| pretended it was. It was just a lie. Pretty much 100% of our
| traffic came in through AdWords, people would search "Something-
| something concerts tickets", got an ad from us, and be duped in
| to buying them at ridiculous prices."
|
| Sounds very scummy.
| shortlived wrote:
| The author agrees
|
| "I very much regret working on this First job, insecure about
| your career prospects and whether you're able to get a new job,
| and it becomes easy to rationalize these things to yourself."
| andi999 wrote:
| The scam works because they put you under time pressure and
| the refund laws for internet purchases have an exception for
| concerts/events. So you think it is almost sold out and you
| can just get your 2 tickets you want for 200 bucks, you
| order, afterwards you realize... Wait a minute... There are
| official sellers... but that's it, you have to pay.
|
| Let's hope karma exists.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| It's not like the big promoters don't have a taste for this
| just as well.
|
| Welcome to the machine!
| 73gfg wrote:
| Google censors YouTube in the name of protecting people from
| their own stupidity, meanwhile profiting from the same
| phenomena through AdWords.
| whack wrote:
| It gets worse
|
| > _At one point I learned that one company we connected with
| would literally just invent concerts: they would guess "they're
| probably doing a tour next year" and start "pre-selling"
| tickets for it at extraordinary prices._
| Bayart wrote:
| Hey now, it's just branch prediction !
| spicybright wrote:
| You should get into marketing!
| vitiral wrote:
| Marketing to geeks
| zapstar wrote:
| This reminds me of when I joined a company that used Dropbox for
| deployments. Install and configure Dropbox on each server, drop
| your updated files into Dropbox on your local computer, and boom
| -- deployed. (Sometimes.)
| gmmeyer wrote:
| This is a truly bizarre article. The practice he is outlining
| here is wild, no reasonable company would do this. Lots of
| companies however end up with bizarre and dumb build systems for
| reasons of history, but this one is the strangest I have ever
| heard of. Even just reading the article I cannot really come away
| with a sense of how or why they did this and it is so strange
| that my brain doesn't wanna accept that it existed.
|
| However, it's also bizarre because it seems to not just contain
| an explanation of this weird tech but a lot of vitriol. This guy
| seems to have outlined what was a dysfunctional place where a lot
| of junior people got a nice start to their career. This doesn't
| seem to me to be a good reason to badmouth the place. You as a
| senior engineer should be helping people to be better coders, not
| shitting on them for being junior developers. (And yes the owner
| was bad but that's no reason to shit on the juniors!)
|
| I think if I were interviewing this guy and saw this piece I
| would immediately slam then Strong No Hire button.
| ishiz wrote:
| This is a good opportunity for me to ask something I've been
| wondering for a while about what is appropriate to put on a blog
| tied to your real identity.
|
| The majority of this article could be seen as negative toward the
| author's former employer. The website is also listed on the
| author's CV, and knowing the author's name it is easy to find the
| website. Is there the possibility that this is seen as
| unprofessional, or that someone who was involved might read it
| and be upset? Maybe it is okay because the company is defunct (I
| assume), or because it was so long ago?
|
| I ask because I am early in my career and I just finished a job
| where the majority of the things I learned were non-technical in
| nature. I would like to write about the lessons learned but, like
| this article, it would have some component of criticism about the
| company. Like the author, my website is on my resume and the
| website can be found by searching online for my name. Someone
| reading my resume could figure out what company I'm talking
| about, and some people who work there might find it. I don't live
| in a large tech hub in the US so it's very likely a future
| potential employer knows some people personally that I might have
| criticized vaguely (but due to process of elimination from the
| jobs listed on my resume wouldn't be hard to identify).
|
| The advice I've been given from people I know is to either not
| have a website tied to your identity at all, or be as
| professional as possible if it is tied to your identity.
|
| What do you think? If you knew this author, or it you stumbled
| across this article because you are thinking of hiring the
| author, how would you feel?
| Layke1123 wrote:
| You should speak truth regardless of what others think. You'll
| get more respect even if you ruffle a few feathers.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Musing about how you used to call your employer like the
| failed painter from Austria is a bridge further than
| 'ruffling a few feathers'.
| fragbait65 wrote:
| I personally wouldn't, but everybody has to decide for
| themselves.
|
| I at least know a few companies that would avoid hiring people
| who criticize old employers, afraid they will be next. I mean,
| most companies have at least some "skeletons in the closet" of
| bad practices or what not.
|
| Having said that I'm usually brutally honest in job interviews,
| I see it as my way of screening companies, if they don't want
| the honest me, then I would probably not fit the company
| culture anyway. So there might be nothing wrong with having an
| honest blog in the end, maybe you receive less offers, but the
| offers match you more.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I would imagine that the how makes a big difference. Publicly
| on a blog vs privately in an interview is one aspect of that.
| And your tone: matter of factly stating problems vs agitated
| ranting.
| cerved wrote:
| it's often more fun to read the agitated ranting
| arp242 wrote:
| I think this is a good question; as the author of this, my
| general attitude to these kind of things is that I'd rather
| just be myself rather than try to tactically modify my
| behaviour to get better outcomes.
|
| I've seen people advise that you should "avoid controversial
| topics" on first dates, as that "might be a turn-off". Well,
| maybe it can be (certainly had a few dates like that), but that
| would also be boring conversation, and not very meaningful as
| such if you're actually looking for a serious relationship
| (which doesn't apply to just romantic relationships by the way,
| also other kind of social relationships). Related comment from
| last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23788380
|
| It's partly cultural as well; I've seen this in certain
| countries ( _cough_ England _cough_ ), where everyone avoids
| talking about anything meaningful so all they talk about is the
| weather or some such pointless conversation because they're
| afraid someone could possible disagree with something they say.
| It's not like I'm _against_ small-talk, but if that 's _all_
| you do... Okay, I 'm exaggerating a little bit, but it's
| certainly very different from my own Dutch culture where people
| tend to be a lot more forthright.
|
| It's not like I will just say whatever without any filter or
| consideration for other people's feelings, or what might be
| inappropriate, or without being receptive to feedback.
| Actually, I try to be quite conscious in how I communicate,
| especially online where the lack of body language and diversity
| of culture/social norms can make things pretty darn hard. But
| at the end of the day this is mostly about _how_ you say
| something rather than _what_ you say. e.g. "this is stupid"
| vs. "I'm not sure if this is a good idea".
|
| There are always trade-offs of course. I was known as
| "Carpetsmoker" online for years and I changed it across the
| board over a period of a few years to "arp242" mostly because I
| felt "Carpetsmoker" didn't sound too professional (a lot of
| people seem to associate it with drug use - I don't even like
| to smoke cannabis! It was just a funny joke I made when I was
| 14 that turned in to a nickname). I still think it's kinda
| funny, but what's an appropriate nickname when you were 14
| isn't necessarily appropriate when you're 36 and actually use
| your GitHub as a way to earn your living, and it doesn't really
| matter all that much what your name is; so I just changed it.
|
| I publish it on my personal name because I see it as my
| personal space. Being anonymous would make it "arp242's
| personal space" rather than "Martin's personal space". I know
| some people like to keep their "online identity" more separate
| from their "real life identity", but personally I don't really
| separate things out all that much.
|
| This is a bit rambly maybe; I'm having a hard time to
| articulate my feelings on this ... but I hope it makes sense.
|
| And, of course, everyone can make their own choices in this.
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