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Comment by eltondegeneres | Hacker News Reader

How do you control/diff System Initiative resource changes with git? I'm not a fan of GUIs for infrastructure stuff since it's usually harder to review, automate, and roll back to a version other than N-1.

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You don't, because we built the functionality in to the data model - you can review changes (in multiplayer!) and automate things directly in the application. Usually when we're talking infrastructure code, you don't really roll back to an N-1 version. In SI, you would make the changes you want in a change set, it would tell you if it looks like your change would work, and then you would apply the change set to run the actions needed.

Can you review the changes async or over email?

You can show up whenever you want to! Today it happens in the UI, but we could certainly send you a diff in your email at some point. :)

How do you keep an annotated history of your changes? Using revision control is not about rolling back, it is about knowing why things are the way they are.

It's a good question! Having a history of how things transformed over time matters. We keep track of that in a couple of ways - one is the graph snapshots themselves, and the other is a raw history log. It's really just another view of a snapshot of the graph at a particular time, and a delta between that graph and the current.

We have lots of planned work coming here - but we have a very rich dataset to do it from, and we're stoked to get there.

Having the history of changes is a step, but the important part of that is the why those changes were made. Git can capture this with good commit messages. Do you have any plans to capture that "why"?

Yep! The application of Change Sets is a similar moment to record the "why", alongside all the information about what was done. We have more to do here, along with adding things like RBAC that requires review before change sets can be applied based on ownership of resources, etc. But this is the plan!

Thanks for answering my questions! Look forward to playing with it.

Another nice thing about using code is you can easily include comments explaining why something is done a certain way, right next to the code that does it and thay is also included in the history.

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