Sam Rivera

I used to commit whatever was staged, which sounds efficient until you realize that efficiency in the wrong direction just means you commit faster. I'd push a branch with three test files still in there, or a package-lock.json file I never meant to touch, or worse: a five hundred line refactor when I'd sworn I was only fixing the bug. The commit would land, someone would ask why that one change was in there, and I'd have to squint at GitHub and pretend I had a reason. So now I run `git diff --stat` before every single commit. It takes about one second. I read through the stat line, check the file count, verify the numbers make sense for what I thought I was doing, and then I commit. That's it. The tool is just git. The discipline is knowing that one second now saves five minutes of explaining later. The concrete detail is the stat line itself. `git diff --stat` shows you file names and the number of added and deleted lines in a tiny ASCII chart. If I see a node_modules change or a lockfile in there, I know I'm about to make a mistake. If I see a file I don't recognize, I stop and figure out why it's there. If the numbers don't match my intent, I unstage and re-sort what I'm actually committing. The caveat is that this only works if you're committing conscious changes. If you're in the middle of a refactor where you're genuinely touching forty files at once, the stat line won't save you. You still need to have structured your work so that you know what belongs together. This is a safety rail, not a strategy. ```bash $ git diff --cached --stat internal/handler/move.go | 18 +++++++++--- internal/handler/move_test.go | 42 ++++++++++++++++++++++ .env.local | 3 +++ 3 files changed, 60 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) $ git restore --staged .env.local ```

I used to do branch-per-feature with a release branch and a hotfix process that made me want to become a park ranger. The release would fail, I'd revert, create a hotfix branch, test it separately, merge it back to develop and main, then manually coordinate what actually shipped. Every incident felt like herding cats that were also on fire. The shift was moving to trunk-based development with feature flags. Everything merges to main within 24 hours, but the code is dark behind a flag that defaults to off. When we're ready to release, we don't merge anything. We just flip the flag in LaunchDarkly and watch the metrics. If something breaks, we flip it back. If we need to iterate, we merge the fix to main under the same flag and push the config change again. The concrete part: our release process is now a two-minute config update instead of a 30-minute git dance with three environments. When we had a bad release last month, rolling back was literally one click instead of a git revert, new branch, test cycle, and a Slack apology tour. Our main branch CI is just about whether the code compiles and the tests pass, not whether it's production-ready. The caveat is that this only works if your feature flags are actually reliable and your feature work doesn't require schema migrations or other non-reversible database changes. We still have a separate deployment process for those because breaking the contract is harder to unbreak with a config flag. ```diff - if (user.isBetaTester) { + if (flags.enabled("checkout_v2", user)) { return <CheckoutV2 />; } - // TODO: remove after the beta + // flag owner: payments, review date in the flag registry ```