A while ago I was having a conversation with a colleague about whether or not it’s important to keep our git history clean.

“My rule is to only ever merge into main, and rebase into feature branches,” I explained, “because it keeps history so much cleaner and easier to read.”

“Yeah, but I never really read git history,” he replied.

The irony? Earlier that very day he had asked me…

“Do you know why this feature was implemented this way?”

“No, I don’t. Who wrote that code?”

A moment later. “Ah it looks like it was Chuck. But I don’t understand…”

Then we had hopped on a Zoom call and shared screens, and together we disected Chuck’s dirty git history to try to make sense of his code.