Attention Is All You Need

Now that I've gotten yours, a disclaimer: This post is not, in any way, related to those mighty text manglers out there.

I'm working on a task, nothing out of the ordinary, when suddenly I come across a glaring violation of all that is holy, a newline where no newline should go in some code far, far away.

Being no barbarian but a cultivated - or so I tell myself - developer of reason, I do what must be done in such a situation: Getting rid of the newline, it's not like there are other options. But attention, although being all you need apparently, is not one of my strongest suits, so I quickly forget about the newline and proceed with my task.

Of course it gets committed with the other changes. I'm no machine, and even if I was, Rube Goldberg would be my mother. But I'm not fighting this alone, and my ally git does not forget, so there comes the time when I go through the commits and detect this unrelated change.

You may think such matters not, but imagine: You're reading a novel about a king and his castle, and just as the intruders are knocking at the door and the story really picks up its pace, have you ever thought about making holiday on the Caribbean islands? Order now, and get one day for free on caribbean-holidays-now.com.

There are worse things for sure, but for someone reading this, it taints the immersion. It grabs attention from where it should rather be, and attention is a precious good.

Do your reviewer (including your future self) a favour. Split away the change (it's only one click away), move the commit to another branch or right at the beginning, clean up the history, be golden. Use whatever tool you like (I can recommend one!), but make the change, no excuses. And maybe think about making that trip anyway.