Willi.am

At my job, its not uncommon to work on a change that builds on another change which is still in code review. Sometimes a coworker is adding a component that I want to consume, and other times Im just breaking my own work into multiple stages to simplify code review. We squash commit to master rather than merging development branches, so whenever th... e code I depend on lands in master, I do an interactive rebase. This removes the unsquashed commits and cleans up my development branch. I also do a similar rebase if the code Im building on is updated while its still in development. In either case, it can sometimes be tedious to figure out which commits in my branch are mine, and which commits Im building on. This is especially annoying if Im building on my own branch, because then all the commit authors looks the same. To solve this, Ive started leaving a marker for myself in the form of an empy commit to delineate my changes. This way when I rebase, I get a nice little marker in the interactive rebase screen that tells me where to start throwing away commits. Because the commit is empty, the rebase command will automatically ignore it by commenting out the commit. If Im done with the marker, Ill remove it or just leave it commented out. Otherwise, I uncomment that line to keep the marker commit around after the rebase. Either way, since we squash commit to master, the empty commit eventually disappears and doesnt clutter up my Git history. This is also fairly trivial to even if you have an in-progress branch that you later decide to rebase onto another in-progress branch. Heres how I do it: Thats pretty much it. Ive found this to be a helpful way to leave myself breadcrumbs, especially when I havent touched a branch for some time. I was recently looking at a log file generated by a cron job and was frustrated to discover that the log didnt have timestamps. After a little thought, I figured out how to make sure all future logs from that cron job have timestamps. In my case, the cron job was a Lets Encrypt renewal: ...Read More