Why are some developers so afraid of commitment? I’m not talking about relationships, but something equally as important. Committing your code to a repository before it goes stale or you lose the changes. I’ve witnessed a couple of different scenarios this year that drive me a little nuts:
- I’ll commit as soon as I’ve got it all working: The developer wouldn’t commit code for the first 3 weeks of a project, until he had virtually upgraded all of the system and built the foundations of the new project. Meanwhile, everyone else is sitting on their thumbs.
- I didn’t want to commit because I was afraid I’d mess up your stuff: I checked back in with a client 6 months after we last worked together. He stopped committing code after we left because he was afraid of breaking something we did, or having to merge code. Now he has to merge 6 months of stuff! It turns out the merge was relatively easy since no one else was working on the code at that time, but on a related pet peeve, hundreds of tests were now failing because he also wasn’t updating those.
It’s not that hard to reverse a commit if it’s really a disaster, but the odds are yours won’t be. Just get the code checked in already, will you?
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