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I do 99% of my coding at work. At work we have Gitlab, Confluence and Jira and these all already contains mountains of context for all of our work. Pretending t

by mdoms 4y ago

I do 99% of my coding at work. At work we have Gitlab, Confluence and Jira and these all already contains mountains of context for all of our work. Pretending this context doesn't exist and storing it all in a Git repository isn't helpful.

lelandbatey 4y ago
I also do my coding at work, with Gitlab/Github, Confluence and Jira. And yet, due to various leadership decisions and technical migrations over the years, we have lost huge piles of records due to migrating work trackers, document stores, and VCS hosts (e.g. Unknown -> Jira -> Pivotal Tracker -> Jira). Due to these crappy migrations, we don't have old merge requests, old wiki documents, and even some old repositories. Sure, it's possible to find those in old archives sitting in an S3 bucket if I were to take a couple days, but they're not 'at my fingertips'. What is at my fingertips though? All the git commits of every repository that we still have. Which means that the only thing that's actually endured has been the commits. So, on behalf of folks 5-20 years from now who'll be scrutinizing your work, please put the context into the repo directly since it's the only thing that'll stick around.
eikenberry 4y ago
I'm speaking of coding in a larger context then... Where it can exist outside of the limits of a single company and a single team. In those sort of cases no, it doesn't really matter where you keep the history. It is a business decision and it is up to the business to decide to switch providers and absorb the loss. I'm speaking of code that others will read. Maybe it is free software, maybe it is proprietary but shared by a larger team, maybe you are writing for customers... any way about it, if the code is to be maintained and read again over time the development history should be captured by a revision management tool like git.

by mdoms 4y ago

lelandbatey 4y ago

I also do my coding at work, with Gitlab/Github, Confluence and Jira. And yet, due to various leadership decisions and technical migrations over the years, we have lost huge piles of records due to migrating work trackers, document stores, and VCS hosts (e.g. Unknown -> Jira -> Pivotal Tracker -> Jira). Due to these crappy migrations, we don't have old merge requests, old wiki documents, and even some old repositories. Sure, it's possible to find those in old archives sitting in an S3 bucket if I were to take a couple days, but they're not 'at my fingertips'. What is at my fingertips though? All the git commits of every repository that we still have. Which means that the only thing that's actually endured has been the commits. So, on behalf of folks 5-20 years from now who'll be scrutinizing your work, please put the context into the repo directly since it's the only thing that'll stick around.

eikenberry 4y ago

I'm speaking of coding in a larger context then... Where it can exist outside of the limits of a single company and a single team. In those sort of cases no, it doesn't really matter where you keep the history. It is a business decision and it is up to the business to decide to switch providers and absorb the loss. I'm speaking of code that others will read. Maybe it is free software, maybe it is proprietary but shared by a larger team, maybe you are writing for customers... any way about it, if the code is to be maintained and read again over time the development history should be captured by a revision management tool like git.