History of a Thriving Codebase

We follow best practices like test driven development with the hope of minimizing bugs and making our applications easier to work with over time. These techniques will take us far, but why should we limit our efforts to just the code we write? In this talk we will explore how the history of a codebase affects the live's of the developers working on it. We will dig into manipulating a codebase to create an effective history through writing wonderful commit messages, creating topic branches and rebasing commits. Let's explore how we can make life a bit more manageable in the fast moving world of software development.

1. History of a Thriving Codebase
2. Hi, my name is Brett Chalupa.
3. @brettchalupa
4. Thanks for coming out tonight.
5. I live in Burlington, Vermont.
6. I help organize the Burlington Ruby Conference. You should come! August 1st, 2nd & 3rd http://burlingtonruby.com
7. I work at CramerDev.
8. I am developing the new Chef community site.
9. I really enjoy programming. It is definitely more fun than doing your taxes.
10. This talk was inspired by Pete Brown.
11. He is my Yoda.
12. We are writing a book together on this very topic.
13. Heck, it even has the same name.
14. History of a Thriving Codebase
15. What is a thriving codebase?
16. A thriving codebase is in active development and is in a healthy state.
17. It is a codebase you would be proud of.
18. Maybe it is the open source project you hack on at night or the code at your day job.
19. Your commits tell a story.
20. Your commits are the best* documentation in your entire project. *If you are doing it right.
21. Examples of Open Source Thriving Codebases
22. Rails
23. Discourse
24. Supermarket
25. git commit -m “gtfo”
26. git commit -v
27. There are three kinds of commits.
28. Progress Commits
29. Anchor Commits
30. Merge Commits
31. Writing Wonderful Commit Messages
32. Write a message that future you would read and go “oh, that is why I did that.”
33. git rebase -i
34. Do not fear the conflict.
35. ag HEAD
36. git rebase --abort
37. Take some time to think about Git and how you use it.
38. My name is Brett Chalupa.
39. Let’s get a beer later!
40. Thank you.