Yes, going back and understanding why something broke/has changed is incredibly valuable. Often it's not because of one singular decision but a collection of decisions over time that resulted in some behavioural regression. Being able to easily hop through all the commits of the recent past is incredibly valuable for me to understand how we can prevent such errors in the future, not just patch over the current one and move on. Fixing things without considering how we got here I tend to find leads to messy code; extra checks and assertions that aren't necessary if one takes the time to update the underlying assumption or modules that end up too tightly coupled because an extra bit of logic is added to fix that one bug.Obviously it's possible to go too far; not every commit needs an attached essay. Many of my commits are just "fixed typo" or "added unit test for X", but then sometimes I'll write a short paragraphs or two explaining my rationale, referencing the commits that came before
No comments yet.