Category Archives: Tools

Source control commit messages

It might seem to many that this topic is quite insignificant, and should not take much space in the programming blogosphere. If you ever had to browse the history of several dozens of commits, trying to figure out which changes could have introduced a bug, and more importantly why, you understand the importance of it, for sure.

The issue with the generic commit messages is that they don’t provide enough history information. Once you find yourself looking into the file history, you’ll appreciate all the additional effort to which you, or your colleague, has put into thinking of a meaningful commit message. When you think about it, it’s not that much of an effort to think about what you have done and put it into writings for your future self.

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Code reviews

Before I dwell into practices that I find useful for improving the code readability, I would like to describe one of my favorite tools for keeping the code clean – code reviews. While it may seem cumbersome and overhead to some, having someone else to have a look at your master piece, you will be surprised how many different things one can find in it. The reviewer might point out to some things that you might’ve overlooked or forgotten, or even point out to a better way to implement a feature, or a piece of it. For example, in the simplest case, a reviewer could have a better knowledge of the source code of the system, or part of it. During the review, he can point it out for you that a method that does exactly the same thing already exists, so that you can remove it. Even better, you could analyze both methods, choose a better implementation, and remove the other one. You know the saying: “Less code, less bugs.“?

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