Yesterday morning I sat down to start a new project. Before I got started, I knew I needed to put this in source control. Now, the project was going to be in AWS, but, AWS has shut down their flavor of Git, CodeCommit. I decided to use GitHub instead, no big deal.

Well, until I looked at my GitHub repositories.

See, I use GitHub all the time. I put my presentation code there. I have examples there. I published the code for my book there. I'm shoving stuff in to source control pretty willy nilly all the time. I've been pretty tactical, adding stuff on the fly and working way more remotely and not centrally.

Yeah.

My GitHub was a mess.

There were repositories there I didn't recognize. I found duplicate repositories with no idea why. Failed experiments. Just a jumbled up pile of, probably, junk. What's worse, because it's just me and my own code, no team, I hadn't bothered using good code commit messages. Further, I wasn't in the habit of putting in good, oh heck, any, ReadMe files to show what the heck the project was for. I realized that before I could get going on yet another repo with bad documentation, poor naming standards, and all the rest, that I would need to clean up.

The irony wasn't lost on me. I fly around the world teaching people how to get their database code into source control. I go off on rants about how important proper naming standards are. I crack jokes about bad commit messages. In short, every single silly thing I had done to turn my GitHub repositories into a hot mess, I tell all of you not to do.

I spent a chunk of yesterday, and will probably be spending some more time today, cleaning up a mess I knew better than to create.

I see you out there. There's a whole bunch of you saying, "Hoo, Grant, why'd you do that? I'd never intentionally violate good practices myself." And, sure, for a few of you, that's probably true. The rest of you, well, come on, look around, you're with me. We just don't always practice what we preach. It's a humbling, but useful, reminder.

I want to say, it doesn't hurt to slow down for a minute and be sure you're doing what you know you should. However, yesterday hurt. Regardless, through inattention, I built up a technical debt. Sooner or later, one way or another, you're going to pay for that debt. So, do as I say, not as I do, and be sure you are indeed following the best practices you know you should.

Now, I've got to go write some ReadMe files.