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A lovely write up. Regarding the formatting of commit messages: if everyone on your team is doing things slightly differently is something going wrong and what

A lovely write up. Regarding the formatting of commit messages: if everyone on your team is doing things slightly differently is something going wrong and what could fix it? Is it a respect issue: people don’t follow a consensus because everyone is a headstrong individualist who refuses to play along with others? Is it a communication problem? Are people just not intermingling in the commit message culture enough that they all naturally converge on a house style? Is it a leadership issue? Are there no clear leaders in your engineering team who collude — consciously or subconsciously — to set the tone for everyone else? Is it a technical issue? Without a pro-forma commit message template or additional tooling, are you failing your eng org by not giving them the framework / training wheels / guard rails they need to align on a house style for technical documentation? I’ve been part of very healthy teams who largely ended up self organising into a consistent house style with a little help from tooling. I’ve also been part of unhealthy teams who fork themselves into multiple internal cliques that don’t intermingle enough to build up a monoculture. The healthiness of the teams might correlate with the commit message / commit graph style, or it might not. I wonder how it could be done better.

keybored 2y ago
Specifically the commit formatting? How to write and markup? A lot of people don’t care enough. Likely someone will be on your team. And if they all care then it might still be the case that they won’t have a house style. Because it’s still well-written and legible.
- gorgoiler 2y ago
  Yeah, commit message formatting as a proxy metric for how closely aligned your engineers are. Another one might be “do they all dress kind of the same?” Lots of successful teams literally dress identically (Real Madrid, Biles et al., Seal Team Six, Destiny’s Child) or at the very least have an underlying culture that joins them. An actual culture, not just a list of corporate touchstones, that you can visibly see either with a dress code or behavior.

keybored 2y ago

Specifically the commit formatting? How to write and markup? A lot of people don’t care enough. Likely someone will be on your team. And if they all care then it might still be the case that they won’t have a house style. Because it’s still well-written and legible.

gorgoiler 2y ago
Yeah, commit message formatting as a proxy metric for how closely aligned your engineers are. Another one might be “do they all dress kind of the same?” Lots of successful teams literally dress identically (Real Madrid, Biles et al., Seal Team Six, Destiny’s Child) or at the very least have an underlying culture that joins them. An actual culture, not just a list of corporate touchstones, that you can visibly see either with a dress code or behavior.