That was the FIRST commit to that repo. Not that it's great reasoning, but really how much info does 'Initial commit.' convey as opposed to 'asdf'?

For a start it would have stopped me mistaking the first commit for the last commit. More importantly, where you see the commit message next to lines of code[1], "initial commit" hints that you can assume the line came with an import or boilerplate.

1. https://github.com/expressjs/body-parser/blame/master/index....

If you clicked on the 86446f74

You would have gotten: https://github.com/expressjs/body-parser/commit/86446f74d5c6...

Which shows parents 0

Bad commit messages are a big warning sign to me too.

Go take a look through TJ's Github credentials. I don't know who made that commit, but TJ has this well handled I'm sure.

I would argue that TJ's Github credentials don't necessarily make the best argument for his long term project. The guy is brilliant and prolific, but he admits to not being the best at long-term maintenance.

For instance, his response to the whole n rm -rf debacle: "yeah it's kinda tough when you have 250+ OSS projects, inevitably some get messed up over time and I merge broken shit haha". That being said, it looks like he's let other folks take over Express (who are all qualified). He didn't even know the logger was named "Morgan" until he read it in a blog post about Express 4.