Today I will tell you why you should say no to git squash merges. Even better I will show you. First, I will explain what lead me to write this post. Then, I will provide you with steps to reproduce a problem that seems ignored. A problem that will eventually bite you if you keep using git squash merges. No spoilers until you get there. Hopefully, you will get my point. Since the aim of this post is to save you time in the future or even now this will also be the latest entry of my future-proof series.

Continuous what?

Continuous delivery. You may recall that in my previous post I announced that today’s entry would be revolving around continuous integration. And technically it can count as such since we will cover continuous integration along the next step. That next step is continuous delivery. If you are not familiar with these terms and the concepts behind them I will sum them up briefly.

Basically, continuous integration allows verifying that your codebase still builds and passes tests passing whenever you push changes. Add a trigger to deploy your code to production upon success and you pretty much have the idea around continuous delivery.

How I unblocked a frozen pull request

A few weeks ago, I saw a pull request to modify one of our web jobs which codebase is pretty old and had no tests. The pull request had no tests either. The thing is that we decided to make unit testing mandatory for any pull requests a couple of weeks before.

I started reviewing the code when I noticed someone else already posted a review. A pretty laconic “please add tests”. Not a bad nor a mean review but not a really helpful one. Proof of it is that it was posted about an hour before and the pull request was blocked. Indeed we do not untested logic to enter or remain in our software. Yes, it is aligned with our new policy about tests. That being said, the web job code was tightly coupled and pretty impossible to test as it was.

Last month, I posted about Postman enabling you to test your APIs with little effort so that you can build future-proof software. Here we are going to cover setting up continuous integration for a simple project by using Newman to run your Postman collections. You may have heard about continuous integration in the past. Most commonly, continuous integration will build software from one’s changes before or after merging them into the main codebase. Even though there is an infinity of tools that allow implementing continuous integration, I will focus on Appveyor CI. In order to make things simple, I will create a very basic web API project and will host it on GitHub.

Some context first

How did I come to write a class allowing dynamic interface implementation in the first place? Ever had to work on a huge company project over the weekend? Because it is the weekend you pick up fixes what should be easy configuration changes. Then you think it will take you only a couple of hours then you will be off to the gym. I thought that yesterday and boy I mislead myself, much mislead indeed. Basically, I had to update a couple of big projects to remove fields that are null from the JSON response. All of that listening to stuff like the Ding Dong Song, Purple Lamborghini and Slipknot’s Psychosocial. On the first project I had to add a little line to have that working, so the second one should be the same right? I actually thought I would grab another task before leaving that improvised hackathon.