Jud Flow

Keeping a nice and tidy code repository makes me happy. Here’s the typical process I use to avoid messes:

1. Create my-sweet-new-feature branch from main
2. Make some awesome code edits, then commit them
3. Make some slightly less awesome edits, commit them also
4. Run some tests, nothing works; debug and commit the fix
5. Decide my originally awesome code isn’t so awesome; rewrite the whole feature and commit
6. Tests pass locally, yay! Push my-sweet-new-feature to Github and create a pull request
7. Hrm, tests fail in pipeline; whoops, forgot a file; commit and repush
8. Okay, tests pass now, so message team for review
9. That’s a reasonable request, change made and committed
10. Fine, we’ll use your naming convention; change made and committed
11. Ugh, made a spelling error; committed
12. Fixed moar typos
13. Uggggggh, one last commit to fix spacing; pushed to Github
14. Wha? Tests failing? :facepalm: forgot a file again
15. Commit that file and push one last time for realz
16. Tests pass, team reviews and approves, we’re good to go
17. Pull an update of the main branch
18. Come back to my-sweet-new-feature and rewrite all the commits on top of updated main; group edits into a clean subset of logical changes, one per commit, that makes it look like I wrote the code perfectly the first time, with nicely crafted commit messages that will mean something to some poor future developer that has to maintain my code ten years from now
19. Run tests to ensure everything still passes; it does
20. Force push to the pull request, obliterating all those ugly prior commits with these nice clean ones
21. Try to merge the branch to main with fast-forward only option, forget that Github doesn’t support it (curse you Github! even flipping CodeCommit supports fast-forward only merging)
22. Fast-forward merge my-sweet-new-feature to main locally so my final commit signatures are preserved
23. Try to push main to Github, but it fails because the branch is protected
24. Unprotect main temporarily, repush
25. Dang it, someone merged new changes since step 17; repull main and rebase my branch
26. Re-push my final changes and re-protect main

See how easy that is? No excuses moving forward, my friends!