Monthly Archives: April 2015

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Always diff before you commit

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If you don’t diff before you commit you don’t know what you’re committing.

When programming anything even remotely interesting, we’re making changes all the time.   Change, change, change.  Phase 1, phase 2,  experiment 1, experiment 2, etc.  And we’re using Version Control Systems, like git.  (If not, stop reading and learn git)

If you believe as I do, you should only commit working code, then we must safeguard our git repos from danger from ourselves.  That’s why you should always run git diff and scrutinize the changes before git commit, to make sure debug, merge conflicts, and other unwanted changes are not making into the big time.

It’s like look both ways before you cross.   Diff before you commit – make it a part of your stitch in time.

Design, Elegance

Less Is More

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You know you’re doing a great job when, adding new functionality to a code base, and you wind up removing more code then you’ve added.  Less is More.

I once heard boast a programmer that he’d written million lines of C code.  That seemed undesirable to me.  Better you should boast that you’ve written an entire system in under 1,000 lines of code.

Doing more with less, requires good design and a lot of reusable code.   Doing more with less means you have less to maintain, and less that can go wrong.

So pride yourself on how small your code base is, not how large it is.