I’m maintaining a lot of different projects at the moment. I thought it would be useful to describe the process I use for adding a new feature to on

Simon Willison’s Weblog

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2022-01-12 18:30:06

I’m maintaining a lot of different projects at the moment. I thought it would be useful to describe the process I use for adding a new feature to one of them, using the new sqlite-utils create-database command as an example.

I like each feature to be represented by what I consider to be the perfect commit—one that bundles together the implementation, the tests, the documentation and a link to an external issue thread.

Every piece of work I do has an associated issue. This acts as ongoing work-in-progress notes and lets me record decisions, reference any research, drop in code snippets and sometimes even add screenshots and video—stuff that is really helpful but doesn’t necessarily fit in code comments or commit messages.

Even if it’s a tiny improvement that’s only a few lines of code, I’ll still open an issue for it—sometimes just a few minutes before closing it again as complete.

Any commits that I create that relate to an issue reference the issue number in their commit message. GitHub does a great job of automatically linking these together, bidirectionally so I can navigate from the commit to the issue or from the issue to the commit.