Experiments at work

I had this interesting scenario where I did hard reset and force push to a commit. However I wanted one of the change from the lost commit.  Once again, Git magic came in handy. Git never erases anything off its memory too soon. This magic spell as I call, is one of a kind and most git enthusiasts must know it by now.  Introducing reflog We all know what you get when you do git log . Let me anyway spell it out, git log gives you a list of changes or in other words, commits available as of the moment in that local repository in the chronologically descending order.  Similarly, git reflog gives you a list if changes or in other words, change history that happened in that local repository in chronologically descending order. For instance, if you have amended the same commit 5 times, you can choose to go back to the 3rd commit amend and restart your work from there. This situation is what I call as,  Bring back from the dead Let us consider the following scenario, You w...

So, it's only recently I've been doing TDD. I have written unit tests before but those were all tests after writing the actual code. Confusing statement right? /**  * @disclaimer  * I'm just preaching what I practice and some parts of it could be wrong.  * Please feel free to leave comments if am wrong  * And I would be happy to stand corrected */ What is TDD? TDD, expanded as Test Driven Development could have this statement as one of the definitions. "TDD is nothing but the art of writing down the business use case one by one and write code based on it paralelly" It would feel like why do I need to write test for that? We could do the same with pen & paper and write codes. But then, you again circle back to write tests for the same. So why not do it this way?  Therefore, let's start with an example, Write a method that accepts two positive numbers as input and returns their sum Let's try and do a mock TDD for the above problem.  Case 1 - Function add...

So, this one another thing that can mess up our repo if you don't do it the right way.  Let's go over it step by step, Pulling latest changes of upstream to your local repo Merging (or) Rebasing 1. Pulling latest changes of upstream to your local repo. So, what's the big deal? We could do git pull to get latest changes from origin to local. That's what I had been thinking until I actively started working with Github and the forked repositories. Git pull won't work here because pull could pull changes only from origin and not upstream. Now, what is origin? what is upstream? Origin - It's the repository of yours that you cloned from someone else's Upstream - It's the repository from which you created your fork Here are the steps, Set upstream URL. git remote add upstream {URL_OF_UPSTREAM} Please perform this only for the first time. After that it is set to your configuration just like username and email Now do, git fetch upstream . 2. Merging (or) Rebas...

It was my first full fledged feature and I was excited to know review comments from my manager. As much as the excitement, the learning that came with taking action on each comment was tremendous and I still can't describe how good I feel about it. It's one of the times when I thought Git to be, "Wow! what an invention!!" Although I had some code refactors, most of the comments were to split my single commit into several different commits for the sake of CI picking them up. I thought, it's simple. I can amend my previous commit to remove files from existing commit and make them part of new commits. That's where trouble came up. I cannot remove a dependency and try to use it assuming I will have that as part of an upcoming commit.  I definitely will have to go back in time to push a commit. At first I thought, I'll change my latest commit to be a dependency commit and create new commit for feature. However that involved a lot of manual work which would def...

Like I said already about hard reset , it's a nasty way to alter a commit. Then what is the better way?  That's exactly what I have written in this post about how we could use amend and what does it do. /**  *  @disclaimer  * Please read this post fully before executing any command. My scenario might not be same as yours. */ What is amend in git commit? In git commit, when you add the attribute --amend  like git commit --amend , it lets you edit the most recent commit.  git commit --amend So, when you give this command, it opens VIM editor with your latest commit message. Here you can edit your commit message and update it & push. Is that all? The answer is no. If you have changes in any of the files and you want to add them to your most recent commit, you can stage those files to commit. Then when you execute the above command, the most recent commit message is shown in the VIM editor or whatever default editor you have along with the newly staged...

So fellas, it's been a while since I wrote and I hope this article is of help to whoever reads this.  Let's start with bit of an introduction. Until my previous employment, there wasn't much guideline on how we write Github's commit message. One single feature could have n number of commits and it doesn't bother the repository.  Now, am part of  @webex 's  webex-js-sdk  team where committing guidelines are very strict and having a bit more deep knowledge of git commands has become essential. This made me explore git commands on regular basis. So I thought why keep them to myself while I can share them. It was my first ever PR and my changes were approved except for a few minor changes. I honestly didn't know how to make changes to existing commit and now, I had two choices.  Create a new branch from master and re-do the work manually Do some git magic and make the current branch work well.  If it were old times, I'd have gone with option 1. It's very...