I am just gonna throw this in here: Is anyone familiar with The Magic of tidying up?
Marie Kondo is a japanese organizing consultant teaching people how to organize and declutter mostly their physical spaces, which in turn also has a huge emotional effect on them. Words that often are heard in her TV series or read in the aforementioned book are joy and gratitude. Basically, only hold on to the items that spark joy for you and be grateful for the service items you no longer need served you.
So, what has that to do with coding? When I took a closer look at this magic of the sympathetic mother of two living on the other side of the planet, I saw a valuable lesson in her teaching - especially for my pupil and co-worker. I do not know who else needs to hear this, but just read the following lines carefully:
Change whatever you like in your local copy of the code, we have Git.
Of course, be sure which changes you check into the repository, but be assured, if they are still enjoying some leisure on a nice and comfy feature branch of yours nothing bad can happen (except the occasionally failing pipeline yet show me one developer who did not accept the responsibility for that little red icon). Again - Git.
And even if your changes land in a trunk, main or production branch - it is all cool. As long as we know about it no one has to stay and badge up the damage in the course of an extra night shift.
All nice and well, but what has all of these reassurances to do with the magic that introduced this post and why would anyone post these self-evident statements about Git?
Git (as well as other source control tools to also get this out of the way) gives us as developers a unique opportunity other professions can only dream of. We have to power to make changes disappear, to change to way of history and are the masters of the now and the a little bit later! And... Okay, but let us be real here, we can try out ideas basically for free. Of course, every action consumes at least some time, but we trade this time for findings we would have never known about otherwise.
So do as you please with your code, especially if you are an beginner. Do not be afraid of getting rid or let us say letting go of one or the other line of code (and please, stop leaving code comments in there). Ask yourself does this line of code spark joy aka do something good for the system seen in its entirety? and feel how freeing and motivating this minimalist approach to coding can be.
Photo by RODNAE Productions!
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