Don’t go down the “git blame” rabbithole

/via http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2017/12/19/no-git-blame/

You’ve probably all done the “git blame” thing at some point or the other, right? You know, the one that goes something like

1. 1. Spend a few hours tracking down a bug
2. 2. Discover code that is … “interesting”
3. 3. “Interesting” rapidly turns into “WhatTF is this?”
4. 4. “git blame”, followed by “LOL, of course the code was written by Bob”
5. 5. Hilarity ensues as you (and your buddies) laugh at Bob

Now think of your postmortems. If you’re doing them — and I hope you are! — you’re probably striving for blameless postmortems. As The SRE Book puts it

A blamelessly written postmortem assumes that everyone involved in an incident had good intentions and did the right thing with the information they had. If a culture of finger pointing and shaming individuals or teams for doing the “wrong” thing prevails, people will not bring issues to light for fear of punishment.
…
When postmortems shift from allocating blame to investigating the systematic reasons why an individual or team had incomplete or incorrect information, effective prevention plans can be put in place. You can’t “fix” people, but you can fix systems and processes to better support people making the right choices when designing and maintaining complex systems.

Now ask yourself, how do you reconcile “blameless postmortems” with the “git blame”? Of course, yes, you can always justify anything, but in this case I’m referring to the “git blame” thing above, where you ended up laughing at Bob. Not “with Bob” but “At Bob”.

The answer, of course, is that you can’t. Don’t succumb to the temptation. Don’t be that person. Don’t do the “git blame” thing, even for fun. Just…Don’t.

Incidentally, I blame nomenclature for at least some of this. Why couldn’t it have been “git credit”, “git thank”, “git praise” or some such? Maybe something to do with #TechBro culture?