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Micro Commits

Micro-committing is the practice of frequently committing small changes while working within an Git repo.

How?​

A micro-commit is a commit which only contains changes that are related to each other including a short + descriptive commit message.

This may seem like a lot of work but once you get in this habit, it makes a ton of sense and actually helps you be more productive.

Workflow​

To illustrate the process of micro-committing, here's a hypothetical situation where we are adding a new UI element to an HTML/CSS-based web app.

  1. Write the inital working feature: At this point, commit the HTML and CSS for your feature as it stands. This gives you a point to compare future changes against if you run into errors. This commit should not include anything else.
  2. Find and fix bugs: Commit each bugfix individually; ideally splitting up by different parts of files if necessary/possible. Lots of IDEs will allow you to do this visually. At this point, you can now track how each fix has changed the codebase.
  3. Make the code pretty: Formatting, refactoring, etc. Things that make your code easier to read and fix at a later date. Commit after this is done, fixing any errors that cropped up beforehand.
  4. Push to remote! (If you haven't already)

A good detailed guide: A Practical Guide to Micro Commits | Niko Heikkila

Why?​

Many developers tend to make large, infrequent commits full of unrelated changes. This can make it hard to track how a project has evolved or how different parts of a codebase have changed. Some benefits include:

  • Reducing risk of losing work: Frequently committing and pushing means that your work gets incrementally saved.
  • Debugging via commits: As you fix bugs or develop new features, small commits allow you to figure out (and revert) exactly what changes might be causing errors.
  • Merge conflict resolution: Resolving merge conflicts can be made easier via micro-committing, since the git merge algorithm has more information to work with.

More information​

There is an excellent blogpost by Tim Ottinger on the Industrial Logic blog.