Onur Yildirim onur-yildirim

Error Handling in Practice

My experience is mostly with Java backend services in the cloud, so the advice in this post will almost certainly be biased towards this kind of error handling. But hopefully, some of it will be generally applicable and help you maintain and debug your programs in the long run.

I don't claim that these are universal best practices, but I have found these to be useful as general guidelines. As always, use your best judgment and do things that make sense in your context.

Log the whole thing

In Java, a full exception is:

Revert the full commit

Sometimes you may want to undo a whole commit with all changes. Instead of going through all the changes manually, you can simply tell git to revert a commit, which does not even have to be the last one. Reverting a commit means to create a new commit that undoes all changes that were made in the bad commit. Just like above, the bad commit remains there, but it no longer affects the the current master and any future commits on top of it.

git revert {commit_id}

About History Rewriting

Delete the last commit

Deleting the last commit is the easiest case. Let's say we have a remote origin with branch master that currently points to commit dd61ab32. We want to remove the top commit. Translated to git terminology, we want to force the master branch of the origin remote repository to the parent of dd61ab32:

	1) Create a branch with the tag
	git branch {tagname}-branch {tagname}
	git checkout {tagname}-branch

	2) Include the fix manually if it's just a change ....
	git add .
	git ci -m "Fix included"
	or cherry-pick the commit, whatever is easier
	git cherry-pick {num_commit}