Alright, folks have been asking about this ‘zachariah branch track’ piece of work I did some time back. Let me tell you, it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. It just sort of landed on my plate one day, looking like trouble from the get-go.
Digging In
So, the first thing I had to do was figure out what this ‘zachariah’ thing even was. Turned out to be an older project, barely any decent notes left behind. You know how it is. And the ‘branch track’ part? Well, they were basically losing control over all the different code versions floating around. People were working on different features, experiments, bug fixes, and nobody had a clear picture of what was what. A real mess, especially when it came time to put things together.
I spent the better part of a day just digging. Went through old commit messages, trying to piece together who did what and why. Looked through shared drives for any kind of documentation. Felt less like tech work and more like digging up ancient ruins.
The Mess We Found
And man, the state of the branches… it was wild. Seemed like people just made new branches whenever they felt like it. No consistent names, half of them looked like they hadn’t been touched in months, maybe years. Dead ends everywhere. And how were they tracking this? Supposedly, there was a spreadsheet. Somewhere.
I eventually found it. And guess what? Totally out of date. Useless. Trying to match the few entries in that spreadsheet to the actual code branches in the system? Gave me a proper headache. Seriously, there was a moment there I thought about just packing it all in.
Getting Things Sorted
Okay, so complaining wasn’t going to fix it. Had to roll up my sleeves. Couldn’t just delete everything and start fresh, tempting as it was.
- First step: Got the team together. We needed some basic rules. Decided on a simple naming pattern for any new branches. Like feature/this-new-thing or bugfix/that-annoying-problem. Super simple, right? Just needed everyone to stick to it.
- Second step: That spreadsheet wasn’t cutting it. So, I wrote a little script. Nothing complex, mind you. Just a basic thing that could automatically scan our code repository.
- What the script did: It listed out all the active branches. Checked when they were last worked on. If someone actually wrote a description for the branch, it pulled that too.
- Making it work: Set it up to run every morning. It just spat out a simple report, put it somewhere everyone could see it easily. No more relying on someone maybe updating that old spreadsheet.
Had to nudge people quite a bit initially to actually use the new naming rules and pay attention to the report. Change is hard, even simple stuff. But we got there, mostly.
Where We Are Now
Look, it’s not like everything is perfect now. People still forget the naming thing sometimes, or leave old branches hanging around longer than they should. But, and this is a big but, it’s so much better than it was.
We actually have a clue now about what’s being worked on. Merging code isn’t the complete nightmare it used to be. It’s still stressful sometimes, but it feels more under control. That little script I wrote? Still running. It’s actually saved our bacon a few times, stopping us from accidentally merging some really old, broken code we’d forgotten about.
So yeah, that was the whole ‘zachariah branch track’ adventure. Mostly just involved cleaning up a mess and putting some simple processes in place. Just another day at the office, right? But getting that sorted really did make a difference down the line.
