Interviewer pulled up an old repo of mine and asked me to explain some genuinely embarrassing commit history

Should've expected it since the link was right there on my resume, but I hadn't looked at that repo in probably two years. Commit messages like "fix" and "fix again" and one just called "please work". He pulled up the log and asked, half-joking, what happened here.

Instead of getting defensive I just walked him through it honestly — first real project, didn't know about atomic commits yet, here's what I'd do differently now looking at it. He seemed more interested in that answer than he would've been in a clean history.

Still went and force-pushed a squashed version right after the call anyway, mostly for my own peace of mind.