Some Thoughts about Personal Development Goals for Software Engineers

How To Squash All Commits Of Your Feature Branch

Usually you have a lot of “intermediate” commits while developing on a feature branch like WIP, Review changes, Some cleanup, Fix jenkins. These commits are neither atomic nor does it help to read them in the history. They purely serve the purpose to persist the current work, trigger another build on your buildmachine or doing some fixes you discovered while testing. So before I rebase my changes to master I’d like to squash all commits that i’ve done to a single one. Usually I use interactive rebase for this purpose but since I need to actively tell every commit that I want to squash it I found it tedious. Also its easier, most of the time, to rebase onto master since you only apply conflicting changes to the end-result of your work without the intermediate steps you had to take. So I came up with my own git alias that solves this for me. Introducing: git squash <Commit/Branch> <Message>

Marcus Held

Useful Git Aliases That Ease Your Life

When you work with git you can define aliases to make your experience even more productive and elegant. In this short post I’d like to present aliases that I use frequently and how they work. And I’ll start with my favorite: git recent-branches.

Recent Branches

git recent-branches

This command gives you the following output:

The result of the recent-branches alias.

This command shows you all branches you recently worked on. That solves the usual problem of me forgetting the names of the branches I worked on.

Marcus Held

That's How Wrong Google Analytics Can Be

This blog is not very old yet. I just started it a month ago and of course I wanted to know if somebody is even reading it. So after a few days I included Google Analytics to get an impression of the visitors of my page and if I even have an audience here. But barely any visit got tracked and since I didn’t even filter out my own ip I had the impression that I’m basically the only user of my page. But that impression was wrong, which I noticed when I switched to server side tracking.

Marcus Held

Code-Held Goes Open Source

Today I have an awesome Message. Since I also post about technologies I use on this page I decided to put the whole page open source on gitlab . Feel free to discover how I developed this blog and which technologies I use.

I had the project in a private repository before but after many considerations I decided to not transform it directly into public space, because I used to have my nginx config in there as well and at some point unmasked ssh keys (I exchanged them of course but you never know…). So I put the latest state of the page into a new repository and took care that the SSH key that is used for publishing the website is properly masked in the pipeline.

Marcus Held

Transparent Gradient Effect on Background Image

I built a new neat feature on my blog posts detail page that displays check constraints in the constructor instead of bean validation as a background image in the top of the rendered page. The trick to get the transparent fading effect via css is using a linear-gradient on top of the actual image.

It’s important to state that the linear-gradient effect is applied to the whole size of the block. So The block must have the exact same size as the background image to produce this effect. Check out the snippet below to get an idea how to do that.

Marcus Held