The latest seminar in practical philosophy was a presentation about problems of overdetermination and preemption in climate action. My rough notes are below. I’m trying a new styling format for these. The notes from the talk itself will be in a normal white or black font (depending on if the post is being viewed in light or dark mode). My interjecting comments will be [L: in square brackets and in a different color].

The latest seminar in practical philosophy was a presentation about problems of overdetermination and preemption in climate action. My rough notes are below. I’m trying a new styling format for these. The notes from the talk itself will be in a normal white or black font (depending on if the post is being viewed in light or dark mode). My interjecting comments will be [L: in square brackets and in a different color].

Six years ago, David Thompson wrote a popular blog post called “My favourite Git commit” celebrating a whimsically detailed commit message his co-worker wrote. I enjoyed the post at the time and have sent it to several teammates as a model for good commit messages.

I recently revisited Thompson’s article as I was creating my own guide to writing useful commit messages. When pressed to explain what made Thompson’s post such an effective example, I was surprised to find that I couldn’t. It was fun to read as an outside observer, but I couldn’t justify it as a model of good software engineering.