The Perfect Commit

April 16, 2025

Willison, Simon. "The Perfect Commit". Archived. Retrieved April 16, 2025.

For the last few years I’ve been trying to center my work around creating what I consider to be the Perfect Commit. This is a single commit that contains all of the following:

• The implementation: a single, focused change
• Tests that demonstrate the implementation works
• Updated documentation reflecting the change
• A link to an issue thread providing further context

Our job as software engineers generally isn’t to write new software from scratch: we spend the majority of our time adding features and fixing bugs in existing software.

The commit is our principle unit of work. It deserves to be treated thoughtfully and with care.