Nov. 28, 2021, noon

PinkLetter - Teach with your commit messages

PinkLetter (odone.io)

Welcome to my PinkLetter. A short, weekly, technology-agnostic, and pink newsletter where we cultivate timeless skills about web development.

My Ramblings This Week

What question do you answer in your commit messages?

maybe this shit will work now is not the best commit message. Sure, it’s fun if you are doomscrolling on Twitter, not so much when you are stuck on a piece of code while production is on fire and you need to fix it asap.

You want to provide enough context around the change: what it does, how it’s accomplished, and why it’s needed. However, I suggest you go a step further: make your commit messages a teaching moment for the people to come—including yourself in a month when you’ll rage blame a file and discover you are the author.

Elsewhere on the Web

Write 5x more but write 5x less by Mike Crittenden


How to Make a Gem of a Gem by Justin Searls

This presentation from RubyConf 2021 will show you every single step involved in creating and releasing a brand new gem—all in the first 8 minutes! The other 22 minutes will distill a decade of hard-fought lessons about how not to make a gem to help you ensure your next gem is a great one.

(Riccardo: Give it a chance even if you are not a Ruby dev!)


Why is it hard to automatically suggest what index to create? by Depesz

Should I put it in index? Or not? What will I do, if it has 20% selectivity, but together with condition on d it will drop to 2%? Should I index it on (a,d)? (d,a)? (a) where d = ‘done’?

You just read issue #75 of PinkLetter (odone.io). You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.

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