Using Version Control is a skill, and it’s one that most technical professionals should learn. Even sysadmins and infrastructure people can benefit from version control, especially as people use infrastructure as code and GitOps with products like Terraform.
Writing a commit message is a bit of an art, and it’s a good skill to have. I saw a post on how to write one, and I like the overall advice. Talk about why you’re making the change, not what you’re doing.
The post has good practical advice about structuring a commit message, especially to ensure the messages are terse and easy to understand. Like much of coding, to do this well requires practice, and feedback. Ensuring your team agrees on how to do this and reviewing messages to help everyone improve will build a more cohesive team as well as reduce the amount of explicit communication you need to have.
Our time is precious as developers, but our attention is even more precious. Every interruption from Slack, a text, or any synchronous communication could break our flow. Many of us complain about meetings taking time out of our day, but the small questions and queries from others, especially at random times, can be worse than meetings.
Building standards, habits, and providing short documentation in common areas, like commit messages, can reduce the need for one developer to interrupt another. The more we work together as a team, by agreeing on and adopting standards, the better we work together as a team.
Steve Jones
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