Hot take: Even these ‘useless’ comments help, since they relieve you of the burden of reading the code itself, even if it’s trivial. One line of English is easier to parse than one line of trivial code.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Client: it doesn't work
Dev: did you open from the other side?
Client: now when I eat it, it tastes like box.
Hello! I'm a hobbyist in this space (scripting/coding), does anyone here have a:
- gold standard of what commit messages should look like?
- common practice/etiquette for commit message?
I never had a team or guide or mentor and when I saw this i felt that my commits are like smoke signals describing that there's a fire. which isnt really helpful.
I tried to contribute to a python module that I use daily, my PR was so over engineered (iirc i added just 3 lines, but with tests, screenshots, CI/CD) i think to compensate for my lack of experience that I got called out ("wow this is pretty extreme just for that feature").
The gold standard, as so often, is to consult an oracle able to tell you what questions you will be asking when looking at the comment or commit in the future. Then answer those questions and write them down.
In lieu of an oracle, use your experience and best judgement.
Oh and never write whole papers to explain what you're doing, unless you're actually writing a whole paper. Instead, drop a cheeky doi;// URI as the only comment of the whole file to document that you're an experienced enough programmer to copy from papers instead of stack overflow.
We’re lucky in that the inventors of our technology are still alive (for the most part). So we can ask them: Linus Torvalds on git commit messages