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John
John

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Commit to Committing

As a beginning developer, I've learned it's essential to write about what you're learning and working on to help cement everything. Learning anything, especially growing technologies and stacks, can become overwhelming. Granted, it can also take some additional motivation to get into the habit of writing about what you've learned or even going back to read what you've learned; but I feel the payoff will be worth it. Git is a valuable tool to help with this!

If you haven't learned Git yet, I recommend taking the time to do so as early as possible. I won't go into it any detail here as there's plenty of excellent guides out there already. But Git is a priceless tool with many helpful commands, particularly git log. I realized committing is extremely handy, especially when learning. Commit early, commit often. Being as detailed as you would like in your messages, you can even write multi-line commit messages.

Having a string of commits to look back on can not only show your progress, what you've achieved (or gotten stuck on) but also help writing about what you've learned. That is, using git log will show a detailed history of each commit made to your repo. I like to filter down on the output. Using the following command below, I can view just the author, timestamp, and commit message to export to a file.

git log --pretty=format:"%h%x09%an%x09%ad%x09%s" > history.md

Once exported, I can use it as an outline for a blog post. There are also some additional log formatting options that you may find useful as well.

In this example, I exported to a markdown file as I use Jekyll sites as my primary blogging engine, but you can really use anything you'd like. Markdown seems to be a standard in blogging these days, so it couldn't hurt to learn this syntax if you haven't already.

This is just a quick overview of my workflow I designed recently, but I'd be curious if other folks find this handy or are using something similar.

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