Hacker News Reader

Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

I've literally never gone over my old commit messages on any personal projects.

The only time I've ever regretted not writing better messages on personal projects is when they eventually became shared. Which is like, twice, in a decade or so and wasn't even a big deal in those cases.

So when I'm writing commit messages, it is exclusively for other people.

View on HN

I actually have. I have a bunch of long-running projects, and it has sometimes been useful to be able to look back to the commit that added some behavior I'm not sure about now and go "oh, okay, this was part of a commit in 2014 where I said I was doing X".

(And sure, you could also say that I should have added better documentation back in 2014...)

I usually use blame to find commits in those situations.

The messages are for other people, also it's like any type of writing: tremendous value in the process of writing. in that way, i'm agreeing with the parent, it is for yourself. The process of writing commit messages is useful to yourself.

Being a good communicator is very commonly the main difference between "moving up" in one's career. Quotes because i don't want this to be a debate about IC vs management tracks.

I tend to write actual documentation or notes as I'm working on the software, even for personal projects. This is far more useful to me than commit messages.

even better!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com