/Git

Writing Tips for Improving Your Pull Requests

- Jeff Mueller tl;dr: “I’m going to show you how to purposely write less by using the techniques below.” Tips are: (1) Make it scannable. (2) Speak plainly. (3) Avoid adverbs. (4) Simplify your sentences. (5) Avoid a passive voice. Jeff adds examples to each.

featured in #404

5 Tips To Creating A (Good) Pull Request

- Danijela Vrzan tl;dr: (1) Keep it short. (2) Add more information i.e. the what, why and screenshots. (3) Leave in-line code comments. (4) Assign people or groups as reviewers. (5) Let your colleagues know your PR is ready for review.

featured in #390

Git Commands You Probably Do Not Need

- Martin Myrseth tl;dr: Martin discusses: (1) The empty commit. (2) Pushing locally. (3) Commit ranking. (4) Cat file. (5) Orphan commits. (6) Filter branch. (7) Octopus merge. (8) Rounding off.

featured in #383

The Perfect Commit

- Simon Willison tl;dr: The perfect commit is a single commit that contains the following: (1) A single, focused change. (2) Tests that demonstrate the implementation works. (3) Updated documentation reflecting the change. (4) A link to an issue thread providing further context.

featured in #365

Scaling Git’s Garbage Collection

- Taylor Blau tl;dr: The process for permanently removing unreachable objects from a repository’s history has a history of causing problems within GitHub, especially in busy repositories or ones with lots of objects. In this post, we’ll talk about what those problems were, why we had them, the tools we built to address them, and some interesting ways we’ve built on top of them. 

featured in #354

Git’s Database Internals I: Packed Object Store

- Derrick Stolee tl;dr: Some basic concepts that Git shares with application DBs: (1) Data is persisted to disk. (2) Queries allow users to request information based on that data. (3) The data storage is optimized for these queries. (4) The query algorithms are optimized to take advantage of these structures. (5) Distributed nodes need to synchronize and agree on some common state.

featured in #348

Squash, Merge, or Rebase?

- Matt Rickard tl;dr: "When version controlling your code with git, there are generally three choices when merging feature branches into main. Each has its quirks, so which one should you use?" Matt runs through when to use each, and his preference. 

featured in #339

In Praise Of Stacked PRs

- Ben Congdon tl;dr: "The practice of breaking up a large change into smaller, individually reviewable PRs which can depend on each other, forming a DAG." Ben discusses advantages, including that stacked PRs are easier & quicker to review, since there are fewer changes to sign-off on, and easier to rollback if they cause breakage.

featured in #337

A 16 Year History Of The Git Init Command

- Jacob Stopak tl;dr: "How the git init command originated and how it has changed each year for the past 16 years," along with "snapshots from Git's code every year from 2005 to 2021."

featured in #263

Teach Yourself Git Without Learning a Single Git Command

- Ivan Toshkov tl;dr: "In this tutorial I’ll try to describe how git works without using git itself. Instead, we’ll create a simple, git-like system using just zip, diff, patch and a few simple filesystem commands. The idea is to build a good mental model of how git works conceptually.

featured in #253