Software developers work with a tool called a “Source Code Control” (SCC) tool.
Think of an SCC tool as a library card catalog system that keeps track of everything about the books. The card catalog shows you what books exist, where they are, who the author is, and who has them checked out. And in this card catalog system, you’re allowed to change the contents of the books! If anybody checks out a book and changes it, that person becomes the new author.
When you author a change, you attach a little note that describes it. This message is called the commit message.
It looks like this:
commit 14eacff768fcf58530a65f4bee4fc8f36b251c7a (HEAD -> DEVOPSDEV-1635-modify-status-utils, origin/DEVOPSDEV-1635-modify-status-utils)
Author: John Macdonald
Date: Fri May 10 15:54:52 2024 -0400
DEVOPSDEV-1635 for the love of god...The gobbledygook at the beginning is all of the “what” info that the tool includes automatically. The engineering stuff. With it, you can learn all you need to know about what changed, by who, when, and what it looked like before the change. You can even undo any change.
The line at the end is what I typed in as the commit message.
The best commit messages are brief, but tell you something beyond the what. The why. The purpose. Ancillary effects. Or the author’s state of mind at the time.
You only have a few characters. What will your commit message be?
