Remember the last time you accidentally checked in a gigantic file you didn’t mean to, and had to dig through the Git history for it? And everybody had to update their history and that one guy accidentally blew away all his changes?

Ah, Git . It’s a useful and powerful tool, but it’s also easy to make mistakes that can be a pain to recover from. What if you could avoid some of that pain before you commit your changes?

Over the past year, we have started using Git for some of our projects here at OnLive. As part of that process, we found the need for tools to help prevent mistakes we didn’t want to accidentally make – like checking in giant files, or forgetting to include a bug ticket number in the commit message.

(Article by Ruth Helfinstein, on the OnLive engineering blog.)