The REPL: Issue 144 - August 2026

Today’s REPL is different from most. I usually point to a few interesting articles. This time I found myself writing at length about a single one. Accepting a messy git history Andreas Zwinkau describes two kinds of git users: commit often, or rebase carefully. I don’t see it as a choice between the two. It’s more nuanced. I do both. While developing, I commit whenever I reach a meaningful amount of work 1. Sometimes that’s failing tests that expose a bug, so the red-green cycle lives in the history. Sometimes it’s a class or module the feature needs but that isn’t hooked up to the rest of the system yet. It’s a thoughtful process, but it doesn’t always leave a pristine history. Before I open a pull request, I go through that history. Sometimes I took a path and later backtracked. A file might exist only in this branch because I decided the naming needed work. None of that helps anyone later, so I rebase and squash to present a better story in the pull request. Once I open a pull…