Field Guide to Developer Behavior

changelog archaeology

noun

/ˈtʃeɪndʒlɒg ˌɑːkiˈɒlədʒi/


1

The act of reading eight months of commit messages to understand why a function is named the way it is, because nobody left a comment and the original author has left the company.

“Three hours of changelog archaeology later, I’ve learned the function is called handleLegacyThing because there used to be two handleThings.”