I've been working on this work project alone for over a year. It's mature, it's standardized, it has documented conventions for code style, documentation, commit messages, etc.

A team member contributed recently, but used a different commit message format. No biggie, I asked him to be consistent with the older messages from now on, he complied. For a while, until he got it wrong in a different way. This repeated several times. I was finally annoyed enough to set up a push filter on the repo to enforce the correct format.

One day, he complained in front of the entire team that he was forced to follow a standard on my project. That was terrible somehow, because no other project had an enforced standard. He makes a big deal out of getting rejected by a regex.

The commit message convention in question? English, simple past. "Fixed X", "Implemented Y" etc. So traumatizing, I know. How can you get something that simple wrong? By using your native language instead of English, English but imperative form, meaningless "wip" or "fix" or even "more fix" messages. Is this laziness? I think so.

It gets better. He tried to convince the team to agree on a single standard for all projects, so that "rejected pushes never happen again". The standard he advocated for: Conventional commits. The one with structured prefixes for type, scope, a breaking change indicator and some optional components.

But a simple English sentence was too much to ask for. People, sometimes.