Remember when we said a repository is like a folder with a journal? Well, until now you didn't really write in that journal yourself. GitHub did that for you. That's the reason why your commit messages all look kind of the same:
create index
update index
create kittens
update kittens
update kittens
and so forth.
While these messages tell you which file was changed, they don't tell you what exactly you did. More importantly, they don't tell you why you did it.
Imagine you opened your personal journal from last year, and it featured entries like
new day
day was good
new day
day sucked
watched movie
That's not very telling, is it? Why did the day suck? What movie did you watch? Was it any good?
So let's write a commit message that makes sense.
Challenge
Write a proper commit message that tells what the commit does and why it does it.
How to do it
A commit message shoud be phrased in first person present like this:
- verb (what is done)
- object (to whom)
- reason (why)
So you write from the point of view of the commit. It is easy and tempting to ommit the why part. But this will be the part that makes your changes accessible to other people. In the end they can read the code to see what changed. But unless you put comments within the code, they will never know the reasoning behind your decision.
Actually, you might not remember yourself two weeks in the future :)
So from now on, when you edit your files you will add a helpful commit message. Later your commit history should look more like this:
fix typo on kittens.html
change colors of headlines for better readability
add image of barky to index because dogs are cute too
That's much better, don't you think?
And with this...