Using Git Hooks to Help Your Engineering Teams Work Autonomously

In this talk, Software Engineer Joao Santos will describe how the engineering team at Zalando has been migrating to local Git hooks to ensure that engineers can work autonomously and flexibly. Zalando—Europe’s leading online fashion platform for men, women and children– began shifting from SVN to Git in late 2013. Santos and his colleagues used Python to create a Git update hook that enabled the team to reject changes to a branch while still allowing changes to other branches. He’ll explain why his team chose Python for this job instead of a bash script, point out mistakes made during the process (and solutions his team used to fix them), and the benefits generated by this migration. He’ll also talk about turnstile: a set of open-source, configurable, optional local Git hooks, created by the Zalando team, that enables engineers to abide by internal rules for committing code while following their own coding style and workflow preferences.