The Monday Byte

Welcome to the third issue of the English Byte newsletter!

I decided to change the name of this weekly segment to The Monday Byte cause it sounds better, ya know?

Excited to have you here for this week’s edition!

📖 Word/Phrase - stamp a pull request (PR)

I used this the other day when I had a small PR that I wanted my coworker to ✅ so I could merge.

So it’s kinda like saying, “hey I’m confident this PR is good and I could merge myself, but can you approve real quick?”

• hey, can you stamp this? (link to PR)

• can someone stamp this?

I was so fascinated by this phrase that I went down the rabbit hole to find other examples in the wild.

💬 Pronunciation Tip - Critique of Gonza from Tandil, Argentina

My friend Gonza (@GonzaloSalomon8) who also reads this newsletter shared an audio clip for me to critique.

It’s interesting because he has a natural flow but switches between an American and British accent.

🛑 Send me a short clip under a min (you can use Vocaroo) and I’ll do you next!

🗣️ Real World Conversation - Writing Git Commit Messages

When you work with a team who uses English as the main language, chances are your commit messages will be in English too.

I recorded a 10-min video talking about how to write git commit messages and things to watch out for as a non-native English speaker. I think you’ll dig it.

🔗 Content - 7 Rules of a Great Commit Message

A couple years back a Senior Engineer said to me, “you should be writing better commit messages.” I blew him off.

“Who cares? No one’s reading them anyway”, I thought to myself.

Well turns out if you write them well, people notice.

At my previous job at a startup called Coder, my coworker said something I’ll never forgot. “Man, I am so impressed with your commit messages. Short, clean and very organized.”

Since then, I’ve decided to invest in the craft of software engineering and write good commit messages when I can.

It helps you stand out! And, it’ll help you get better at English.

Read this article to learn the 7 rules of a great commit message. Oh and the verb tense you should use? Imperative.

💪🏼 Exercise - “Clone” a Great Commit Message

One way frontend engineers get better at coding is by cloning other sites.

We’re going to apply that same technique but to commit messages.

Here are two great commit messages that I want you to “clone” by writing out in your editor.

• code-server commit

• Next.js commit

Bonus: write a great commit message in your project, shoot me a reply with a link and I’ll mention it in the next issue 😃 

Thanks for reading! Hope you have an awesome week! 😄

Your friend,
- Joe