Am I not dead? Commit.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve started using git recently, specifically a git-to-tfs bridge so that I can avoid as much contact with TFS as humanly possible.

Most of my recent experience has been with subversion, so I have been unlearning that as much as I have been learning git. The most apparent difference right away is what it really means to make a “commit”.

With subversion, even when working in a feature branch, my commits would be immediately shared with my coworkers. I was basically handing a diff to my coworkers every time I checked something in. Since anything I committed would be immediately shared, I had an extra concern at commit-time: “If I commit right now, and someone else gets latest, will I mess things up for them?”. Despite wanting to commit as often as possible, I could only allow myself to commit when I had completed the smallest chunk of work that could be shipped if I got hit by a bus. This seemed like the most reasonable rule of thumb to follow, but even these commits could end up fairly large.

Subversion is like a video game with sparse save points. You play for a while, maybe even an hour or two, before reaching a point where you’re even allowed to save your progress. You might even get a little lost along the way, and you can’t just jump back to the last save point without wasting all that time.

Working with git has felt a lot more like playing the original Half-Life. Maybe it was really difficult, or maybe I was just terrible at it, but I found myself being squashed or blown up every other minute. Thankfully, instead of having to make your way to a special save point, you could just save your progress at any moment or jump back to any previous save. Have I moved 10 feet? Am I not dead? Save.

Now that I can work with a local feature branch, I can think differently about what a commit actually is. If I commit far more often than I did with subversion, I harm nobody; it’s all just local anyway. When I ultimately push up to TFS, it’ll batch up all my local commits into a single set of changes representing the before/after comparison of all of my work. Any missteps along the way won’t show up to my coworkers, yet while doing the work I could always look back to retrace my own train of thought. Have I made any forward progress, shippable or not? Am I not dead? Commit.