Panasonic Youth

How to annoy and aggravate your coworkers with CVS!

Here are some tips for how to drive your fellow developers nuts using your favorite change management system:

  • Never log your changes. If you are pair programming or having daily meetings you can just tell all your coworkers what your changes were - don't wanna violate DRY!
  • If you do put in a commit message, include your initials, date, time, filename, weather conditions, last good movie you saw, thoughts on where to go out for lunch, and current phase of the moon.
  • Or, commit sweeping changes to 45 files all with the same comment: "changed the foo baz system".
  • Set up your IDE so that your formatting is completely different from the rest of the team, so that everytime you touch a file you will have some extra tabs or line breaks to commit.
  • Commit whitespace/line break changes.
  • Commit code that works in your favorite JDK version when you know that your coworkers are all still using an older version (I'm guilty of this one recently).
  • Commit half of a major refactoring effort, and leave to go on vacation. Turn off your cell phone the moment you leave the office. Laugh as you drive away.
  • Commit Ruby on Rails code when you are on a Java project. When questioned, act completely shocked that you are on a Java project.
  • Commit code that compiles, but causes tests to fail (if it compiles, ship it!).
  • Commit code that compiles and tests fine, but breaks when run in the production environment (green bar, ship it!).

If you put at least a few of these handy hints into practice, I guarantee that your team members will be ready to beat you down by the bike shed by quitting time!