I just made some changes to this site. As I do, maybe once per fortnight, and, I swear, I try not to talk about it too much because nerd nerd nerd boring minutiae nerd so boring.
But I got to thinking. My development process for this site involves a party of one—me—and I can't imagine anyone giving a blinking momentary crap about my codebase. It's not solving a general problem. It's useful to exactly one human, whose name starts with L and ends with yza.
So why do I issue pull requests and carefully amend commits to keep my git history tidy? Why do I go to lengths to write READMEs that no one will (need to) read (ever, for any conceivable reason)? Why create a public repository for an unpublished yeoman generator that no one could ever possibly benefit from? Not only that, but I wrote unit tests.
Am I being pedantic? Do I have a glimmer of hope that someone will somehow benefit from my dusty trail of code? Is this what modern technical vanity looks like? Is it like the mandala in the Alvord Desert in 1990, placed there just for the hell of it, maybe with the expectation someone would eventually notice it?
(p.s. That mandala, despite title to the contrary on the above linked, is not in any way unexplained. An artist came forward at the time and explained how he did it. I have a former colleague who covered this story for local media. It's intriguing and on-theme how only the story about it being supernatural or extra-terrestrial survives now in the longer-term internet annals. I guess that's a more interesting take.)
I have just asked many questions. Asking them to myself, the way I assign myself to my own PRs. However dingbat and talking-to-myself this all may seem, the process just feels right. GIT WORKFLOW FOREVER.