Introduction

This repo provides a pull request template that can be automatically applied to every pull request.

Pull request templates are incredibly useful: they allow developers to write consistent, clear pull request descriptions that are helpful to those (like new hires or code reviewers) who are required to review hundreds of lines of code without any context (😭). More importantly, a PR template acts as a safeguard to ensure that team members don't accidentally forget steps before, during, and after merging and deployment.

If you've ever been lost for words when writing a pull request description (🤔), or forgotten to migrate that data after you deployed (🤦🏻‍♀️!), or thought you'd write a spec later for your code but failed to do so (😠), then this is a great starting point.

In order to tick off your checkboxes, just add an X in the square brackets after the dash (like this: - [X]), which will then become:

• Check me if you use a pull request template!

Obviously, each team / repo will be different, so please feel free to fork this template and customise it to your heart's content (💗). If you have any suggestions on how to improve it, please tweet at me at @carmenhchung - I'd love to hear from you!

Not convinced?

"I don't need a PR template," you scoff. Or, "My colleagues won't let me sit with them if I ever tried to apply this to every PR!" you lament.

I get it. Implementing new processes takes a lot of time and energy (and sometimes a little shameless begging). If it helps, feel free to watch my talk on "How to write technical documentation that will save your career", which shows how documentation - including using a pull request template - can make a huge difference to your workflow.

Don't want to see my face? (Don't worry, that makes two of us. 😅) I'll be posting a blog post (link to come) to convince you that using a pull request template will do wonders for your coding life.

Fine. I'll do it. But how?

To apply a pull request template to every pull request - i.e. it's going to appear in the "Description" section of every Github pull request that is opened in that repo - just follow the instructions here.

Before you go and implement this though, please do speak to your colleagues about this - you'll need to convince everyone that this isn't a silly idea (pst you can totally send them my talk!).

And just like my shameless plug, sometimes a little shameless begging will do the trick. 😉