I won’t deny it. I came up with the title for this post before coming up with the actual content. It came to my head and it was just too good to pass, because it entices you to think about that subject. What does every programmer need to know, after all?

• 
  What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic
• What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory
• What every computer science major should know
• What every programmer absolutely, positively needs to know about encodings and character sets to work with text
• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
• What Every Programmer Needs To Know About Game Networking
• What every programmer should know about time (the blog post is simply called “Time”, but it was featured in Hacker News with the long title)

What every programmer should know about names (actually titled “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names” — this is about people’s names)

If you run into any other of those lists, let me know at h@ this website’s domain!

When you’re making a large interactive rebase, it’s useful to see what files each commit touches.

Here’s a nice trick. Take the list of commits from `git rebase -i` and save it into a text file, `commits.txt`, which should look something like this:

pick aef18c84 fix something
pick efa1d6pd add a feature
pick 74417d1d something else

then run this:

(cat commits.txt | while read x commit rest; do echo; echo "#" $commit $rest; git show $commit --pretty=format:'## %an' --name-only; done ) > commits.md

This will generate a file called `commits.md`, with contents like this:

# aef18c84 fix something
## Hisham Muhammad
project/some/file
project/another/file

# efa1d6pd add a feature
## John Doe
project/blah.txt
project/another/file

# 74417d1d something else
## Hisham Muhammad
project/another/file
something/else/entirely
spec/01-test_another_file_spec.lua

Keeping this `commit.md` open side-by-side to an interactive rebase session makes it a lot easier to quickly glance which commits touch the same files, which greatly reduces the changes of conflicts when moving commits around. Plus, using hash signs and the .md extension makes the whole thing even easier to read, when your text editor has support for highlighting Markdown files!