Let it be is a popular phrase thanks to the Bible, the Beatles, and my friend Bean [1].
It was back in the halcyon days of a pre-COVID world, May 4, 2019. I was near the end of my internship in Germany and, thanks to my generous employer, had some vacation time to use, so I visited Bean in his new digs in Budapest.
We started catching up. I was telling him about the joys I was experiencing living in Aalen, Germany, an area endowed with the natural beauty of the Swabian Alps. I told him of the hills, how great of a climb you can get on the bike [2], and that I'm always on the lookout for new ones.
I then went on to describe how you could probably determine the 'best hill' in your locale by doing some analysis of the difference in altitude for a set of coordinates in a given area around one's location [3]. He, being a software developer, said: “I bet we could code that!”
So he opened a terminal, created a file, and started to write the algorithm in python. Once the program gave us a decent output, we determined it was time for some libations and to move onto something else —BUT the code! True to form, he committed our incremental progress and gave it the commit message that every repo deserves, one which is in the imperative form *wink* [4]: Let it be.
Since then, I've always found joy in using Let it be as a commit message, because it makes me think of not just John, Paul, George, and Ringo, or Luke, but also my friend Bean.