Rob Pike on good commit messages (2014)
After being in the field for almost a decade now and guilty of so many poor commit messages, I came to the firm realization that a very important trait of a good software engineer is the ability and diligence to write detailed commit messages, and I would have never remotely imagined this during the first few years of my career (I was "raised" in companies who didn't care at all about this and all commits were always "add x", "fix foo", "fix build", ...). It became way too frustrating when I looked back at code committed by myself (or others) years prior and wondered "what is the reason why this code exists?"<p>These days, every single commit I push has an entire paragraph or two clearly describing the changes, and the motivation behind them, even if it's a one-line diff.<p>My team praises me for this, and I think I've been able to influence the culture as I see more junior people taking their time to craft good commit messages and edit their commit history before pushing a PR.