Imma be honest I pulled that estimate out of my ass lol, but I feel like it was pre-pandemic? which would put it at at least 4 years ago and so holy shit I’m gonna go cry in a corner because it’s been 4 years since the start of the pandemic
Isn’t this only the case in github? All my repos are based from master, and I would assume that’s because I init on the command line and push up to the remote?
GitLab also changed a few years back. We host our own, so got the update later than people using the service … it was a bit of an argument at first since everyone wanted to stick with the familiar, but laziness won out. Unfortunately, it’s not really justifiable to go back and change legacy projects, so now it’s inconsistent
If you don’t have any scripts that rely on branch name it should be pretty trivial actually. But I wouldn’t be shocked if you had a few dozen scripts that nobody has looked at in the last century lol
The question actually came up for a new tool to help automate dependency updates. Do we need to change the config to account for the inconsistency?
It turns out we don’t: it correctly uses the default branch, no matter what it’s called. However we had to consider the question. and investigate. It spent someone’s time
It works fine for small projects. I think that with more than 2-3 devs a PR based strategy works better for enforcing review and just makes life easier in general, since you end up with less stuff like force pushes to fix minor things like whitespace errors that break everyone’s local.
Once you understand that everything is similar to a tag, like branch names are basically tags that move forward with each commit, that HEAD is a tag that points to your current commit location in history, and what command moves what kind of tag, it becomes easier to understand.
Suddenly having a detached HEAD isn’t as scary as you might think. You get a better understanding of fast forward merges vs regular 3-way merge.
Also understanding that each commit is unique and will always remain in the history and can be recovered using special commands. Nothing is lost in git, unless you delete the .git sub-directory.
For folks unaware, the technical git term, here, is a ‘ref’. Everything that points to a commit is a ref, whether it’s HEAD, the tip of a branch, or a tag. If the git manpage mentions a ‘ref’ that’s what it’s talking about.
Oh fuck. I didn’t think of that. Than you for reminding me.
Edit: Ah but you can only run this in your local repo. If you happen to push anything, you might not be able to run it on the remote. Many DevOps platforms won’t allow it.
Oh yeah, and anybody else who had fetched in those commits may still have them as well. It’s hard for something to be gone-gone, but it may be annoyingly-hard-to-recover-gone.
Ninjas, super-heroes, black-belt and terms like that are known gender-excluders. I’ve been through a couple of adjustment sessions for company standard job descriptions and it’s unreal how you can change the applicant mix by wording.
Ah yes, I’ve spent decades cringing when I meet a self-proclaimed or even peer-proclaimed “rockstar”, “ninja”, “guru”, “jedi”, or probably a half dozen other “cool” designations for a tech worker.
Those look pretty tame compared to some aircraft that actually took flight IRL - like Nemeth Parasol, Vought V-173, VVA-14, Coleopters, Flettner airplanes, and many, many more. Actually, they’d fit well as a following with “the projects they hire you to work on”.
There really isn’t. For example web browsers can execute assembly now and a good “web developer” (I’d call them a software engineer) will use assembly where appropriate.
With WebUSB (supported in Chrome) and the possibility to build web applications to controls physical devices there’s definitely some web developers who can claim to be proper engineers even in the strict definitions
The classic imagery of someone playing with frontpage back in the day, or screwing around with html in a text editor, sure. But those folks wouldn’t call themselves web developers (there was a phase over 20 years ago where anyone that cobbled together a geocities would declare ‘web developer’ on their resume, but I haven’t seen someone do that in ages).
However, you can get in pretty deep with code running in the browser as javascript and/or wasm. Backend gives them some nested dictionary in json or protobuf and they parse, manipulate, iterate over it, sometimes making some pretty complex visualizations. Basically a ‘web developer’ is nowadays on par with any Game or GUI application developer in terms of what they might be writing. There are a few things left out of direct reach by a browser runtime, but you have access to plenty and the backend abstractions to get something in reach of HTTP are often no easier than the thing being abstracted, it’s just reframed as ‘http’.
The thing is that for a majority of cases, this is all one needs to know about git for their job. Knowing git add, git -m commit “Change text”, git push, git branch, git checkout , is most of what a lone programmer does on their code.
Where it gets complicated real fast is collaboration on the same branch. Merge conflicts, outdated pulls, “clever shortcuts,” hacks done by programmers who “kindof” know git at an advanced level, those who don’t understand “least surprise,” and those who cut and paste fixes from Stackexchange or ChatGPT. Plus who has admin access to “undo your changes” so all that work you did and pushed is erased and there’s no record of it anymore. And egos of programmers who refuse any changes you make for weird esoteric reasons. I had a programmer lead who rejected any and all code with comments “because I like clean code. If it’s not in the git log, it’s not a comment.” And his git comments were frustratingly vague and brief. “Fixed issue with ssl python libs,” or “Minor bugfixes.”
I had a programmer lead who rejected any and all code with comments “because I like clean code. If it’s not in the git log, it’s not a comment.”
Pretty sure I would quit on the spot. Clearly doesn’t understand “clean” code, nor how people are going to interface with code, or git for that matter. Even if you write a book for each commit, that would be so hard to track down relevant info.
Yeah, I think that guy only got a superficial understanding of what Uncle Bob was saying.
My policy as a tech lead is this: In an ideal world, you don’t need the comment because the names and the flow are good. But when you do need the comments, you usually really need those comments. Anything that’s surprising, unusual, or possibly difficult to understand gets comments. Because sometimes the world is not ideal, and we don’t have the time or energy to fully express our ideas clearly in code.
My policy on SCM logs is that they should be geared more towards why this commit is going in, not what is being done. And what other tickets, stories, bugs it relates to.
Lead of a small team of scripters here. The “Why. Not What” is defo a good way of encouraging cleaner code.
Had to request changes recently on a PR like this, big function with comments telling me what it was doing. When they resubmitted for review they had broken it down into smaller functions with good variable/function naming. following what was going on was much easier
Same strategy here, but recently found myself commenting on the “what”. There was a perfect built-in, but not really readable and I couldn’t figure out how to make it readable, so fine
We solve that problem using naming conventions. Branch names must start with the issue key (we use Jira). You don’t do anything in that branch that’s not part of that issue. If you do, you must prefix the commit message with the issue key that it goes with. The commit itself identifies what changed. The Jira issue provides all the backstory and links to any supporting materials (design docs, support tickets, etc). I have to do a lot of git archeology in my role, and this scheme regularly allows me to figure out why a code change was made years ago without ever talking to anyone.
But when you do need the comments, you usually really need those comments.
It’s nice to see you sharing my experience. My code is either uncommented or very severely commented with comment-to-code ratios of 10:1 or more. I hate the files that are soo green… :(
It’s not git that’s complicated. The work is complicated. git is just one of the tools that programmers use to manage the complexity.
I also think that some people get too hung up on having a “clean” history, and trying to “fix” the history after it has already occurred. I usually have enough problems to worry about in the present, without also trying to worry about the past.
I like to rebase on my feature branches before the PR because it’s a gift to my future self that resolves all the conflicts (if any) before my work goes in. I just find trying to figure out how those conflicts got resolved when there are a bunch of merges in more difficult if there’s a problem later. It’s easier to understand for me. YMMV, this does not work for everyone. Etc etc.
Sure, if you’re they type to micro commit, you can squash your branch and clean it up before merging. We don’t need a dozen “fixed tests” commits for context.
But in practice, I have seen multiple teams with the policy of squash merging every branch with 0 exceptions. Even going so far as squash merging development branches to master, which then lumps 20 different changes into a single commit. Sure, you can always be a git archeologist, check out specific revisions, see the original commits, and dig down the history over and over, to get the original context of the specific change you’re looking into. But that’s way fucking more overhead than just looking at an unmanipulated history and seeing the parallel work going on, and get a clue on context at a glance at the network graph.
Using curated commits to optimize for pull request reviewability is highly underrated. Liberal use of interactive rebasing to ‘tell a story’, essentially.
In other news, never work more than one person on a branch (that’s why we have them). Make a new related issue with its own branch and rebase whenever necessary, and don’t even think about touching main or dev with anything but a properly reviewed and approved PR (in case they aren’t already protected), or I’ll find and report you to the same authority that handles all the failed sudo requests!
Also, companies that disable rebasing are my bane. While you can absolutely do without, i much prefer to have less conflicts, cleaner branches and commits, easier method to pull in new changes from dev, overall better times for the reviewer, and the list goes on. Though, the intern rewriting multiple branches’ history which they have no business pushing to is also rather annoying.
This is so incredibly dumb, though I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this. That comment will be buried in the git log if anyone ever fixes a typo on that line.
I made do with my IDE, even after getting a developer job. Outside shenanigans involving a committed password, and the occasional empty commit to trigger a build job on GitHub without requiring a new review to be approved, I still don’t use the commandline a lot.
But it’s true, if you managed to commit and push, you are OK. Even the IDE will make fixing most merges simple.
These threads drive home the point that a GUI of some sort is far superior for most users. I use git kraken, but in the past I’ve used git extensions as well, and I take advantage of so much more git has to offer than pretty much everyone here.
I swear people just want the cli to be better so they claim it is, but I really don’t get how. Especially for quickly scanning the repo, doing diffs, commiting partial files, history, blame, etc.
I have only ever used simply “git push”. I feel like this is a “how to say that you barely know how to use git without saying that you barely know how to use git” moment:-D.
The first time you manually push like that, you can add the -u flag (git push -u origin master) to push and set the branch’s default upstream. Afterwards, a plain git push while that branch is checked out will push the branch to that default upstream. This is per-branch, so you can have a main branch that pulls from one repository and a patch branch that pulls and pushes to a different repository.
My strategy is to just type git push and get some kind of error message about upstream not being set or something. That’s a signal for me to take a second to think about what I’m actually doing and type the correct command.
I can follow along re-typing the same commands told to me by a more senior dev just like any average monkey!
This reminds me of something I made a long time ago: img
Since I am calling myself dumb, I estimate my progress to be somewhere perhaps at the 20th percentile marker? :-D One of these days I’ll RTFM and rocket all the way up to be dumb enough to properly qualify for “below average”! :-P
It’s git push origin branch and then merge after submitting a pull request from branch to main after a successful lint check, build, deployment, and testing in a non-production environment, and PR approval. What kind of wild west operation allows pushing directly to main?
Our changes land in main at my workplace, once they’ve received a code review and all CI checks pass (which includes tests, E2E tests, etc). We use feature flags rather than feature branches, so all diffs / pull requests are against main. We use continuous deployment which means changes are automatically deployed once landed. Changes roll out just to employees, then to servers used by a small percentage of users (2% I think), then everywhere. All risky changes are gated by feature flags so they can be enabled or disabled without a code push.
We just had a customer escalation caused by exactly this. One group relied too heavily on tribal knowledge for code reviews and didn’t want any other process. Once the tribal elders were gone, no one knew all the things to look for, and there was no other way to catch issues
As a Continuous Integration and Test guy, I was standing in the corner yelling “I thought you were DevOps. Where’s the automation?” Fine, Puppet/YAML doesn’t work with a traditional build and test, but you could have done syntax validation and schema validation that would have caught before the code review could have happened (and I showed them how a year ago, even offered to do it for them) and set up some monitoring to discover when you break stuff, before customers discover it.
Do you not use a fork as your origin, separate from the production upstream repo? I’ll push to my fork’s main branch for small or urgent changes that will definitely be merged before anything else I’m working on.
If it’s a private repo I don’t worry too much about forking. Ideally branches should be getting cleaned up as they get merged anyway. I don’t see a great advantage in every developer having a fork rather than just having feature/bug branches that PR for merging to main, and honestly it makes it a bit painful to cherry-pick patches from other dev branches.
I never worked anywhere where they had this set up. I would push to branches and make pull requests, but always work in the production environment.
I was mainly working as a data engineer though so that’s probably why. It’s hard to have test environments since you can’t replicate all the enormous amounts of data between environments without huge costs.
There are many strategies for maintaining test environments for that kind of thing. Read-only replicas, sampling datasets for smaller replicas, etc. Plenty of organizations do it, so it’s not really an excuse, imo.
No I know. But it was “good enough” for the company and we never had any serious issues working that way either. If someone pushed a faulty commit, we just reverted it and reloaded the data from the source system.
A lot of companies have kind of bad solutions for this sort of stuff, but it’s not talked about and nobody is proud of it. But it keeps the environments simple to work with.
No kidding. Never push to main, and you most likely can’t. While I get the joke of the meme, I’d send the person packing if they don’t understand branching, and branch flow, rebasing or reverting. Even if you look up the command or do it all through your IDE, understanding the workflow of using git is important
Git itself does not use that standard yet, so at least now there are two competing standards.
I get that there are cultural reasons why the word master was loaded language, but still, it’s not like institutional racism will go away. Meanwhile, the rest of the world which doesn’t struggle with the remnants of slavery has to put up with US weirdness.
Git itself does not use that standard yet, so at least now there are two competing standards.
Just ran git init in a brand new empty directory, and while it did create a master branch by default, it also printed out a very descriptive message explaining how you can change that branch name, how you can configure git to use something else by default, and other standards that are commonly used.
Also, there’s nothing saying your local branch name has to match the upstream. That’s the beauty of git - you have the freedom to set it up pretty much however you want locally.
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, there is no one standard now. The stupid thing is all the problems that causes is mostly because there used to be one, and stuff written assuming master branches are eternal.
I’ve had a company that had some automation built on git but below GitLab that would not let you delete master branches. When main became a thing, they just started hard protecting those as well by name. It’s because of regulatory, and they are very stingy about it.
So when I created a few dozen empty deployment repos with main as the default, and then had to change it over to master so that it lined up nicer with the rest of the stuff, I’ve had a few dozen orphaned undeletable empty main branches laying around. A bit frustrating.
That said, the whole thing is just that. A bit frustrating. If it makes some people feel better about themselves, so be it. I am blessed in life enough to take “a bit frustrating”.
Yeah that’s fair, I can see how that would be annoying for sure. I think that frustration stems more from company policy though, not necessarily the standard changing. And you know what they say, there’s nothing certain in this world except for death, taxes, and standards changing
It is trash code for sure, but most of the world’s code is trash, so we do have to accommodate trash code when we design stuff. That said, they do need to do this to comply with laws and make sure code doesn’t get lost (it’s finance), and this was the easy way to do it. Doing it better would have taken time and attention away from other stuff.
And standards do change, but they usually change to accommodate new features, or a new software product displaces an old one. I don’t really know any tech standard that changed because of cultural reasons. Point is, change is a cost. It may be worth to pay the cost, but here the benefits were US cultural sentiments that most of the world doesn’t care about.
And the stupid thing is that even when standards change, you are not usually labelled as culturally out of touch if you don’t follow it. Most big orgs don’t follow changes that they don’t need to. Nobody calls you a bigot for running COBOL mainframes in 2023, but they might if you predominantly have master branches.
I guess my perspective is that some people I know were mildly annoyed before lunch about it one day two years ago, since nobody cares about US identity politics, with my personal opinion being if the US didn’t fill up its for-profit prisons with black people who it then those prisons profit off of (just as an example), the word master would not bite as hard, and the whole thing would be moot.
If you don’t have autocomplete set up for your shell, get it working. If someone has a different branch named ma…, ask if you can delete it, and get your team to adopt a decent branch naming convention.
I really wish to work in a team where people have naming conventions for branches that are concerned about stuff like that. Must’ve been a nice place to work at.
I think the reasons was ridiculous. The fact that people didn’t like the word master anymore. But I’m used to it now, so fine, let’s use main. It makes sensitive people feel better.
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