Top all-time · #4582
Jackson Gabbard
Personal blog · jg.ggprogrammingcareer
Jackson Gabbard's personal blog at jg.gg covers programming and career. Since 2016, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “Stacked Diffs versus Pull Requests”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jackson Gabbard's 2018 post comparing stacked diffs with pull requests as an explainer for the stacked-diff workflow used at Facebook and Google.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Stacked Diffs versus Pull Requests12 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2018-10-01
What Hacker News says?
Probably because you're trying to break up your changes. Two good blog posts that talk about this workflow are: https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/ and https://kurtisnusbaum.medium.com/stacked-diffs-keeping-phabr...
Comment linking /2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
on “Stacked changes: how FB and Google engineers stay unblocked and ship faster”Submitted Stacked Diffs versus Pull Requests as a story · 104 points
HN discussionOf the choices that he proposes, #2 seems like the obvious solution to me - but he writes it off as too difficult. Phabricator’s stacked diffs [0] works wonderfully well to support this exact workflow (it isn’t clear from the post which versioning system the author uses and what workflows it supports - maybe I missed it?) [0] https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
Comment linking /2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
on “Confessions of a programmer: I hate code review (2010)”Submitted Cord didn't win. What now? as a story · 65 points
HN discussionMaybe I am just too dumb but I always found pull requests hard for making small commits. Somehow PRs always ended up being on the bigger end. We even tried these stacked PRs but it was quite confusing. In the end we moved to Gerrit and never looked back. We are not super experienced yet but I'd say our commit quality went up by quite a bit. This is a good introduction to the differences of stacked diffs vs PRs: http…
Comment linking /2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
on “A Better Model for Stacked Pull Requests”Submitted Stacked Diffs versus Pull Requests (2018) as a story · 40 points
HN discussionRelevant link: * Stacked diffs vs Pull Requests [1] 1 - https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
Comment linking /2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
on “Show HN: Maiao, Stacked Diffs for GitHub”Submitted Stacked Diffs versus Pull Requests as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI have to admit I’m struggling with this. I know git and PR-based workflows inside out. But I’m trying to read https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/ and the penny hasn’t dropped at all. Nowadays github has a “squash abd merge” button; it’s unclear how many of the points in the article would be addressed by that.
Comment linking /2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
on “Git-stack: Stacked branch management for Git”Submitted The Knowledge Chipper: An Agentic Coding Story as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere's a nice article here: https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
Comment linking /2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
on “Bash script uses gh CLI to open patch stack”Submitted Stacked diffs vs. pull requests as a story · 2 points
HN discussionsort of, but without the commit lineage requirements? I haven't used Gerrit. It's currently a few lines, looks for the branches and commits based on some strings, and prepares a bash script to run the gh cli to open PRs that are chained/stacked together. Was looking at these for reference. - https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/ - https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless - https://cli.github.…
Comment linking /2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
on “Bash script uses gh CLI to open patch stack”Submitted Stacked Diffs and Pull Requests (2018) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI know people who express similar feelings. Usually it is shorthand for "I would prefer stacked diffs" or similar. Two blog posts I've seen people point at: * https://mitchellh.com/writing/github-changesets * https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
Comment linking /2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
on “I (kind of) killed Mercurial at Mozilla”Submitted Real Gs Move in Silence Like Alignment as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stacked Diffs vs. Pull Requests (2018) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Coding Interview Problem: Least Disruptive Subrange [video] as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
