Every Commit A Sentence: Git Commit Messages for Bloggers

If you look at the changelog for my site, Brennan.day, you'll notice two things. First, I am working on this project way too much, and second, my attempt at good git commit message hygiene. There is a problem, though. Across over a thousand commits, 448 were prefixed feat: and 417 were fix:. Nearly the same count, for wildly different kinds of work. A new 2,000-word essay? feat:. A corrected typo? fix:. An automated comment sync running at 3am? feat:. A CI pipeline toggle? feat:. Everything is flattened into two buckets. I have been following what you might loosely call "best practices" for commit messages, but using conventions designed for software library authors is, at the end of the day, a writing practice of its own. I was losing meaningful signal in the process. If you're a writer (or maybe you just call yourself a blogger) first and a developer second, using git as a way to maintain your writing more than anything else, then this blog post is for you. A Brief History of the…