Tag: git

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TIL: List git branches by recent activity

In both my work and personal coding projects, I generally have a number of various branches going at once. Switching between various branches (or remembering past things I was working on) can somethings be a chore. Especially if I’m not diligent about deleting branches that have already been merged.

Usually, I do something like:

> git branch

Then, I get a ridiculously huge list of branches that I’ve forgotten to prune and spend all sorts of time trying to remember what I was most recently working on.

daves/XXXX-123/enable-clickstream
daves/XXXX-123/impression-events
daves/XXXX-123/tracking-fixes
daves/XXXX-123/broken-hdps
daves/XXXX-123/fix-contacts
daves/XXXX-123/listing-provider
daves/XXXX-123/revert-listing-wrapper-classname
daves/XXXX-123/typescript-models
daves/XXXX-123/inline-contact-form
daves/XXXX-123/clickstream_application_event
daves/XXXX-123/unused-file
daves/XXXX-123/convert-typescript
daves/XXXX-123/convert-typescript-v2
daves/XXXX-123/similar-impressions
daves/XXXX-123/update-node-version

At least 75% of those have already been merged and should have been pruned.

There has to be a better way, right?

Thanks to the power of the Google machine (and Stack Overflow), I found out, there is!

> git branch --sort=-committerdate

Hot diggity dog!

daves/XXXX-123/clickstream-filter-events
main
daves/XXXX-123/convert-typescript-v2
daves/XXXX-123/update-node-version
daves/XXXX-123/similar-impressions
daves/XXXX-123/convert-typescript
daves/XXXX-123/clickstream_application_event
daves/XXXX-123/unused-file
daves/XXXX-123/typescript-models
daves/XXXX-123/listing-provider
daves/XXXX-123/inline-contact-form
daves/XXXX-123/revert-listing-wrapper-classname

That list is now sorted by most recent activity on the branch.

Alright. Even though this is better, that’s still a lot of typing to remember. Fortunately, we can create an alias:

> git config --global alias.recent "branch --sort=-committerdate"

Now all I need to do is just type git recent and it works!

Nice.

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TIL: How to change your default editor for git commits

A recent post on Hacker News highlighted the benefits of detailed commit messages in git.

Usually, my git commits look something like this:

> git commit -m "fix: component missing configuration file"

…which isn’t all that helpful. (Related: see XKCD on git commit messages)

I decided to try and utilize this newfound knowledge in my own git commits and I quickly ran into an obstacle. Simply using > git commit opens up vim. Which, I really don’t want to use. (I’m sorry!)

This is something I should already know how to do, but I had to do a Google search to learn more. It turns out, you can change the default editor in git. This makes it much more convenient! How do you do it?

git config --global core.editor "nano"

Replace “nano” with your preferred editor of choice. Now, running > git commit opens up your editor and you can make detailed commit messages to your heart’s content!

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Next level code review skills

I’m always searching for better ways to improve my workflow, increase productivity, and just generally learn new and exciting things. (Besides, it’s part of having a healthy growth mindset.)

We’ve had some big changes on our team during the past year and I’ve felt like I’ve needed to step up when it comes to reviewing code that my fellow colleagues write. While searching for some ideas on how to improve my code review skills, I discovered a blog post from 2018, entitled “Code Review from the Command Line“.

This blew my mind and really helped reframe how we engineers should approach code reviews:

When I ask that other people review my code, it’s an opportunity for me to teach them about the change I’ve just made. When I review someone else’s code, it’s to learn something from them.

Jake, the author of the above post, goes on to describe his setup and custom tooling for conducting an interactive code review.

He uses custom git alias to see which files have changed and how many changes there are, a custom script that visualizes how often the files within the pull request have changed over time, and another custom script that can visualize the relationship between changed files.

All of these go above and beyond the call of duty for reviewing code, but it’s stuff that decreases friction and can make a sometimes tedious process much more enjoyable.

I’ll be implementing some of these ideas into my own workflow in the near future.