---
title: >
  Commit and push something every day
pubDate: 2022-12-02
permalink: >-
  daily/2022/12/02/commit-and-push-something-every-day
---

One of the significant changes that I've found and that's benefitted me whilst developing is to commit and push something every day.

It doesn't need to be a whole feature. It could be a new class with its passing tests, but it isn't used anywhere yet, so it won't affect the existing functionality, or it could be a new test for some existing functionality that was missing previously.

It could be a small refactor - renaming a variable or class name that makes some code easier to read or removing some commented-out code that isn't doing anything other than adding visual clutter.

It could be updating some documentation or [writing a technical document]({{site.url}}/daily/2022/09/23/adrs-technical-design-documents); if you keep those in your version control repository, that would help you implement the following change or to make the documentation clearer for the next reader - whether that's you or someone else.

Committing something at least once a day creates a different mindset to "I'll write everything and push it when it's done".

It makes you break up large tasks into multiple smaller ones and set mini-deadlines for yourself. I used to do the same when I commuted to work on a train and had a task for a freelance project to complete before I arrived. I used to think, "What can I start, finish and commit before I get there?" instead of leaving something incomplete.

You don't need to push your change to mainline. If you use the ["Ship, Show, Ask" approach]({{site.url}}/daily/2022/11/30/ship-show-or-ask) then you could commit to a temporary branch that you either merge yourself once you know it passes the checks, or to show or get feedback from other team members.

Practicing this becomes a habit, and if you're doing test-driven development and committing after every passing test or refactor, you'll find yourself pushing numerous changes a day.

This became my normal approach instead of having long-lived feature branches or lots of unpushed local commits.

I much prefer making as small charges as possible and pushing them as often as I can.