The commit message is a funny artifact of writing software. Its purpose is utilitarian: summarizing each incremental addition or edit of code. Yet they also capture the genius, the wit, and the agony of the person behind the keyboard. Take, for example, this existential message from my coworker Marc Lavallee, when working on our question-and-answer application a couple months ago:

For the increasing numbers of developers who work in newsrooms, these messages join a long tradition of editing notes. There is a century of story drafts dotted with TK’s, CQ’s, and annotations from the messy process of reporting and refining. But the quantity, permanency, and fragility of computer code make commit messages a species apart. Frequently quotidian and obvious, they will sometimes morph into boastful swagger or shameful admission. Often, it’s a panicked plea to the coding gods when breaking news collides with broken code.

As 2012 comes to a close, I collected commit messages from my coworkers at The New York Times and colleagues across the industry with the hope they would provide a snapshot of the year in news apps. A fellow member of my team, Jacob Harris, outlined the dichotomy nicely:

Half of my commits RT @chadfowler: My favorite source control commit message: “I AM AN IDIOT”— Jacob Harris (@harrisj) December 11, 2012

The other half of my commits are “THIS TIME FOR SURE”— Jacob Harris (@harrisj) December 11, 2012

First observation: The messages can pile up. For example, Ryan Pitts, at the Spokesman Review in Spokane, tallied all his team’s commits for the year and concluded: “What I can tell you is that we had about 2,700 commits to our primary repo, and only one ‘fuck,’ related to a z-index problem caused by an ad. We only had one ‘shit,’ prompted by a series of troll accounts. But we had 20 ‘derp’s. So there’s that.”

The Times’ Summer Olympics site logged 14,670 commits from our team over the span of a year. From humble beginnings in the first (and self-evident) “Initial commit” message by Jacqui Maher, scanning through the messages is akin to browsing through storage boxes in your parents’ basement and being overwhelmed by nostalgia.

The following messages note changes big and small, including the basic (supporting genders for horses) and the regretful (my only use of profanity, for a missing “s” that briefly broke our result pages):

Meanwhile, some fixes simply fulfill a programmer’s OCD. Dan Nguyen corrected 25 grammatical errors in the documentation of Mongoid, an open-source framework for the MongoDB database — places where “it’s” should have been “its.”

A few days before the polls closed, Wilson Andrews’ commit message for The Washington Post’s election results map exemplifies the tragedy and triumph of coding furiously toward deadline:

Andrews described the commit as the moment “when I actually began to see light at the end of the tunnel.” I asked developers to include a “diff” — a before-and-after comparison of edits to the code — but he replied, “A whole bunch of code, so a diff is worthless. The true diff was my sanity.”

In a similar vein, Gabriel Dance passed along two commit messages from the final days of work on The Guardian’s election results and electoral college game:

And although each commit does contain a fair amount of context (a line-by-line indication of what changed, when, and by whom), scanning through them can produce its own kind of schadenfreude absent the stress of that particular moment. To wit, Scott Klein of ProPublica sent along a sampling of his team’s commits this year:

Thanks to all the developers named above for sharing a look behind the scenes. Here’s to many happy (and better written) commits in 2013.

Horse photo (not Rafalca) by lhourahane used under a Creative Commons license.