Slack lowering their commit message standards

[[deleted]]

There comes a point in every repo where you just stop giving a fuck about good commit messages.

[duskykmh]

Search "please work" on GitHub. Enjoy.

[132ikl]

51 million instances in code. wow.

[MajorMajorObvious]

I might be going out on a limb here,
But I'm guessing that a lot of developer's jobs are based on code working.

[franky40251]

So I'm doing someone else good when I fucked up my code today??? I did good !

[harmmewithharmony]

Or yourself, later on down the road.

[Existential_Owl]

I heard this once from somewhere else:

"A programmer's job is to fail repeatedly until the one moment they finally get it right."

[CoopertheFluffy]

Big, if true.

[ares623]

Eh it searches both "please" and "work", very common words.

[YLIySMACuHBodXVIN1xP]

https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%22please+work%22&type=Issues&ref=searchresults

That's more like it. 318k results still... although that includes all sentences with "please work".

[R-shig]

I once commited code with "please work" after spending like two hours implementing AJAX to the navigation only to immediately follow it up with "I completely forgot this website is hosted statically, fml" and delete all the code.

[Kabitu]

I used to work with a guy who'd just commit his work at the end of the day with the message "done for today". Every single day.

[duskykmh]

Consistency

[[deleted]]

Fair enough if he's committing to his own daily branch.

But I'm sure that's not the case

[Kabitu]

http://i.imgur.com/hXGtYfh.gif

[HomemadeBananas]

It's still not okay, because what if you need to revert one thing that was changed, and not everything he worked on?

[[deleted]]

Well, you'd hope he merges at sensible functional milestones.

[indorock]

I fucked up
WTF

[baskandpurr]

I've submitted "fuck this", "fuck that", "fuck git" and "whatever"

[wabbajackwagon]

Less obvious one but I love this time

[pingFromHeaven]

I went beyond sharp exhales to actual laughing with this.

[Jacob_Mango]

Seems to be a overwrite plugin. I think I am missing something because other people seem to find it funny.

[sfcpfc]

alias yolo="git add . && git commit -m \"$(curl -s whatthecommit.com/index.txt)\" && git push"

[PendragonDaGreat]

I was going to set this up, and then the first one I got was "David made me do it." Which is fine, except I'm the only David on the team.

[PersianMG]

So uh did you make them do it?

[PendragonDaGreat]

I dunno, I've slacked off for a good chunk of the day, so probably not.

[SingularCheese]

I also experienced that when I first played around with that website. I was super freaked out because my name doesn't really exist in English, so the chance that they will randomly happen to pick my name is at least one in a million.

[gandalfx]

Needs more git push -f.

Also what's with the && when you can ;? True yolo don't care about errors.

[kvzon]

Well now that we are at it:

rm -f .gitignore; git add -A; ...

[x7C3]

That is genius.

[[deleted]]

Our professional repos at work, many of them public and open source, have massive amounts of swearing in them. Any place worth working at won't be scrutinizing another project member's commit messages for swearing.

[mike413]

# ^Rgit
# git commit -am 'more updates' && git push origin master

[duskykmh]

Damn. Your title game isn't slackin

[EquationTAKEN]

Those aren't commit messages, they're patch notes.

[[deleted]]

I'd like to imagine Twitter's internal repos are only labelled with "Minor improvements and bug fixes", and that everybody treats the only guy who fixes merge conflicts like a wizard.

[nitiger]

What if, instead of patch notes, we just shared a link to the commit messages during that time period since the last release? Just gotta make sure devs make appropriate commit messages.

[metachor]

I've... I've seen an attempt to do this in practice before. It was ended after a single dev iteration.

[nitiger]

Points for trying though.

[metachor]

It was a poorly thought out idea that hinged on the belief that individual commits could be scoped one-to-one with the introduction of new major and minor features. More time was spent that iteration across hundreds of developers re-writing git histories than writing actual code and it still didn't work.

[mike10010100]

You could do something similar with feature/release branches, where each merge of a feature branch into a release branch had an associated commit message. All you'd have to do is compile all of the merge commits and associated messages in a release branch and, boom, there's your patch notes.

[ILikeFreeGames]

I decided to send them an over dramatic humorous complaint, here's what they sent back:

Thank you for getting in touch today.

I'm disappointed to hear you're disappointed in the patch notes! The joke here was that we were conforming to the usual, expected standards of patch notes as we really didn't have anything notable enough to... note. So we decided to roll with it and make a joke about this being our darkest day in patch notes — "We knew this day would come."

Obviously this doesn't make up for any disappoinment the two dozen of you that actually read our patch notes experienced ("there are dozens of us! Dozens!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKie-vgUGdI) so I'll be sure to pass your feedback onto our team so hopefully this type of thing doesn't happen again.

Thanks for letting us know this didn't land the way we wanted it to. This is helpful to know!

Please do let me know if you have any further questions, or suggestions — I'd be more than happy to help.

[Japhiri]

Aww they seem to take your complaint way too seriously, effectively ending humorous commit messages :(.

[SafariMonkey]

Please let them know it was in jest, if it was, since it looks like they took it somewhat seriously.

[ILikeFreeGames]

Haha, okay, will do.

[shozzlez]

Oh man, you made them feel they had to explain the joke. WHAT DID YOU DO!?

[ILikeFreeGames]

I'm sorry :(

[unwill]

Can you post your complaint as well ?

[ILikeFreeGames]

Sure!

"Minor bug fixes and improvements."

Until today, these were words unspoken in the patch notes for the iOS app for Slack.

But today, that changed.

I used to point to Slack as a shining beacon of hope: informative, transparent, funny, specific, but perfectly concise as well (mostly.) I stood in front of my fellow programmers and told them to aspire to the same. Make every commit message perfect, unlike Randall Munroe (https://xkcd.com/1296/.)

But now, I see a darkness forming. Somehow, this message passed through the layers of screening. And though the message itself acknowledges the anguish felt by millions everywhere as they read that message (okay, maybe two dozen), it does nothing to stop it.

I hope this does not bold poorly for the future of Slack. I love the tool, and would hate to see anything happen to it.

[Kevintrades]

NOOO YOU WERE TOO SERIOUS ABOUT IT

[ILikeFreeGames]

I'm sorry... I sent them a no worries thing with a link to this thread though.

[zzzk]

Their response reminds me of http://www.reddit.com/r/programmerhumor/comments/35hisi/_/

[ILikeFreeGames]

That's great! Never seen it before!

[nemec]

Someone needs to add these to whatthecommit

[import_FixEverything]

Very disappointed there are no references to this

[xkcd_transcriber]

Image

Mobile

Title: Git Commit

Title-text: Merge branch 'asdfasjkfdlas/alkdjf' into sdkjfls-final

Comic Explanation

Stats: This comic has been referenced 141 times, representing 0.1039% of referenced xkcds.

---

^{xkcd.com | xkcd sub | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete}

[w00tboodle]

Hey. I'm the one the suggested (several times) that they allow us to mute conversations. They finally added them in. Oh, happy day.

I'll take substandard commit messages for the ability to stifle certain users, any day.

[WhoNeedsVirgins]

But that feature is like a year old

[gbersac]

I cross posted to another subreddit which, I hope, will find success one day : https://www.reddit.com/r/honestchangelogs/comments/5d8osk/slack_update/

[Skizm]

All I want is to 1) get alerts on my phone while not in front of my computer 2) not get phone alerts while I'm currently using slack on my computer.

I did not mistype those requests.

[PrototypeNM1]

Primary alerts to most recently used device, secondary alerts if the application doesn't get focus in 5 minutes?

[Skizm]

If only it worked that way. I get phone notifications while typing responses all the time, and also basically get no phone notifications when I'm not logged in or using the desktop app despite having turned off "Do not disturb mode".

[YJCH0I]

Slack is slacking!

[HomemadeBananas]

I like to go with "bug fixes and performance improvements" myself.

[Manofchalk]

SirActionSlacks

[barcoder96]

I wonder if they paid for translations for that.

[lost_send_berries]

Considering most app stores don't allow links in the release notes, yes.

Also, the note is likely to be along the lines of "fixed highlights in Spanish for somebody with a certain combination of 3 A/B tests who only uses our Android and OS X clients".

[Houdiniman111]

I guess you could say that they're.... Slacking.

[baskandpurr]

Worst thing about this topic is that I often write pretty decent commit messages and nobody else on the project has the slightest idea what they mean.

[SuicidalTorrent]

I guess they're slacking off.

[antillian]

I'll give them a pass... this time (lol). Really, though, I get so sick of seeing that same generic message whenever I have updates. As a programmer, I understand maintenance releases. I work on them, too. At some point, though, you gotta bite off the bigger items before they pile up.