When I clone a new project, I put the proper email address (e.g., a company email) as an author email in the local config stored in the repository. It worked fine until I started working for a client whose project is spread across many repositories that I cloned when needed.

I can’t count how many times I forgot to put the correct email into the local config of the newly cloned repository before committing anything into it – just because I was in a rush. In effect, my personal email (which occupies my global configuration) has been leaking many times into commits, sentenced to last forever in the git history. I’ve probably done it more times than I even realize.

To avoid making these mistakes, don’t use a global git configuration for identity.

I create a lot of notes. Seriously, I write tons of notes. Inspired by Getting Things Done method, I treat my mind as a thoughts generator rather than the storage. I capture thoughts, ideas, inspiring quotes, links, and pictures. Mostly using files.

Although I’m on the early stage of creating my custom note-taking solution, I’ve done some work to synchronize notes between devices and versioning them. In this article, I’d like to focus on the latter and I’m going to show you how to set up automatic files versioning.

I’m a software developer so, unsurprisingly, I use git to versioning my notes as well. Instead of manually committing changes, I take advantage of tools like fswatch and launchd to automate this process.