6 ms·

Trunk Based Development

73 points by handfuloflight 8mo ago

jascha_eng 8mo ago
I've rarely seen the first description of it where people actually commit directly to main. Except in very early stage projects. But it does always feel the fastest if you only review code "on-demand" in PRs/MRs instead of enforcing it for every change. I think in a team with good ownership, enforcing formal reviews slows down a lot. But of course in a larger code base where no single engineer can understand all the effects a change might have, having a bit of knowledge sharing and 4 eyes enforced is often the better approach than yolo-ing it. Then again I did build an SQL review tool for database access because I felt like "yolo-ing" production access was also not the way it should be. It's an interesting slider between full autonomy and strict review processes where each team needs to find their sweet spot: https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet/ https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet/
- div3rs3 8mo ago
  We're organized in small teams around specific products. That leads to mob programming being a good fit, so code reviews and knowledge sharing is organic. This gives us an opportunity to commit to main and do direct deploys to production. Treating every commit as deployable is key, but it drives good practices.
- dxdm 8mo ago
  As I understand it, trunk based development does not call for committing directly to main. It says to avoid long-lived branches for releases, whole features, etc. There's nothing wrong with small, short-lived branches that can be quickly reviewed and merged into main. That being said, I've been in a small team where the blessed style was to commit directly to main and do reviews "on demand". It quickly gets features deployed in a way that builds a lot of rot and debt into your project that people quickly lose a good understanding of. Then you just keep piling. There's probably a way to get this done properly with a tiny team of very experienced and well-aligned developers; but that's usually not what you have in an environment that pushes this kind of extreme no-review-interpretation of trunk-based development. Slow down, do reviews, avoid keeping branches open for more than a day.
  - jascha_eng 8mo ago
    > well-aligned developers I think this is very key, if the development style and the direction of the project is clear, much less review and alignment is necessary. And also > avoid keeping branches open for more than a day Big +1 on that, fast reviews are extremely key. Most teams I have seen often took days or even weeks to merge branches though, often because you end up waiting too long for reviews in the first place. Or because of good old bike-shedding. But also because these code reviews often uncovered uncertainties that needed longer discussions. However usually code is easy to change, so defaulting to "just merge it" and creating followup tasks is often the cheaper approach than infinite review cycles.
    - dxdm 8mo ago
      I think it's still worth-while to do reviews. A second pair of eyes does wonders, and it spreads knowledge of what things exist and how they work. If changes are small, reviews can be quick. It's possible to keep building on top of code being reviewed, and even easy when using modern VCS tooling like jujutsu. Once the code is merged, chances are it will not get changed Those follow-up tasks will be displaced by more pressing work that will keep piling onto a slightly unstable foundation, increasing the tilt over time. There is an excluded middle between "no reviews" and "infinite review cycles": proper, timely and efficient reviews. They are worth investing the time to get right. They will start paying dividends months down the line, and boy will they keep paying. This is not about trying to get things perfect from the get go, but to get them done right while you're there. "We'll fix it later" is not gonna happen, and is much more expensive than it initially seems.
    - KronisLV 8mo ago
      > However usually code is easy to change, so defaulting to "just merge it" and creating followup tasks is often the cheaper approach than infinite review cycles. I wish this was the "default" mindset everywhere, especially in those cases where you have that one colleague that loves to nitpick everything and doesn't see an issue with holding up both releases and wasting your time over menial pedantic stuff. It would be so much easier to merge working code and let it work, and keep those TODOs in the backlog (e.g. trash). In a sane world, code review would be like: 1. Will this work and not break anything? We checked it, it's okay. There are no apparent critical or serious issues here. 2. Here's a list of stuff that you can change if you wish, here's why it might be an improvement. 3. Okay, we have some left-over nice to haves, let's keep track of those for later (or not) and merge. It gets infinitely worse if you're working on 3 projects in parallel and the person wants long winded calls or starts nitpicking about naming, or wants things done exactly their way as if it's the only way (doubly worse if their way is actually worse by most metrics and tastes).
- roggenilsson 8mo ago
  In my previous job we worked like this. We had one dev branch that everyone pushed directly to and the dev branch was eventually branched to an RC branch which in turn was merged to master once the release was complete. The team was small, around 6 people, and the codebase was maybe medium sized (~500k LOC). There was no formal review process, instead it was up to each team member to ensure the quality of their own and others code. In practice I would read through all commits that came in the previous day while having my morning coffee. If there was some egregious I would talk to whoever made to commit to make discuss if something should change, but this was fairly rare. Formal PR reviews were only ever really used for new members or for bigger/sketchy changes where someone wanted more eyes on it. Because I ended up reading most commits, I ended up knowing how pretty much the entire codebase worked. It takes a while for this to develop, but the more you do it the better you get at it, especially in the context of a single codebase.
- maccard 8mo ago
  I work in games, and we do commit directly to main. On a smaller team you can get away with pre submit review, post submit checks. On a bigger team you need pre submit checks but honestly the point where you need this is much much later than you think. One of my previous projects had 100+ people committing directly to main with no pre submit checks and jt broke once or twice a day. The builds took longer than that to go through so you just always sync to “last known good”
swiftcoder 8mo ago
stacked PRs. stacked PRs! Seriously wish the stacked PR workflow would gain more traction outside of FAANG. Apart from the (somewhat pricey) Graphite offering, there's no standard UI for managing stacked PRs in the wild.
- reywilliams 8mo ago
  GitHub[1] is working through this now, hopefully it leads to more adoption. [1]: https://x.com/jaredpalmer/status/2019817235163074881?s=20 https://x.com/jaredpalmer/status/2019817235163074881?s=20
  - swiftcoder 8mo ago
    Damn! Can't wait
- ahartmetz 8mo ago
  I think Gerrit has something like stacked PRs - and incidentally it's used for Chromium and was created for running its own public open source projects by Google. It's also used by the Qt project, which is where I sometimes use it. Gerrit looks ugly and is not very easy to use at first, but at least it's not slow like GitLab and GitHub.
- Hamuko 8mo ago
  What's the benefit of stacked PRs?
  - swiftcoder 8mo ago
    It's basically automatic rebasing of a set of PRs built on top of each other. Makes it easy to split large changes into manageable pieces that are asymmetrical for your colleagues to review individually, and makes it easy to maintain feature branches long enough to get the feature working end-to-end
- amabito 8mo ago
  The tooling gap exists partly because git's data model has no native concept of "this branch's upstream is another feature branch" — each PR is independent from the forge's perspective, so rebasing one layer in the stack requires manually re-targeting every PR below it. FAANG-internal tools solve this by storing the stack relationship in a metadata layer outside git itself, then regenerating the PR graph after each rebase. Without that layer, the bookkeeping falls on the developer, which is why most teams abandon the workflow after two or three levels deep regardless of how disciplined they are.
alfiedotwtf 8mo ago
The thing missing with a lot of these branch management posts is release management… because it’s lovely to live in an ideal happy-path world, but what happens when main is tagged for release, only some customers update, main moves of with multiple breaking changes, and only then do some customers require fixes to their releases (who could all be on different i.e even older tags)? Do you take their tagged release, fix it there, and then send them that branch release with the fix, or do you send them a fix on current main - you know, the main that is now a million releases ahead with multiple breaking changes? And what about all the intermediate release tags? Do you fix each one there too if they have the problem, or do you only update when customers on those releases start having that issue too? And if you fix to their old tagged release which is incompatible from main, does this mean you have to do this fix twice i.e on their tagged release and also fix it for main? But what if this fix affects other people who are all on different branches too? Now… times this by 20 different customers all running different hardware and different branches with different problems :( Maybe my comments are off topic, and don’t get me wrong - I prefer “trunk is releasable” motto, but I think maybe as an industry we should all come up with an Acid Test (like the only CSS Acid Tests) so we can through all these branching strategies into the ring
- F-W-M 8mo ago
  If you need to support multiple versions at the same time, you need to extend TBD in some way. We just cherry-picked stuff back to release branches, if we needed a fix.
  - Zardoz84 8mo ago
    we have a "release" branch and a "develop" branch. The release is trunked on the last released version and (in theory) only gets fixes. If we need to fix a more older version, we create a temporary branch on that version to fix it, and we cherry pick the fixes (or merge to) to release branch and then to develop branch. The triple mortal loop, comes that we have two versions of the product. One with the old no responsive frontend and other with a modern responsive frontend. And we need to release and develop the two versions for sometime, before the direction decides to kill the old no responsive version. So we end with 4 branches: release, release_rwd, develop and develop_rwd. If we fix something in release, we need to do a diamond merge : release to release_rwd, release to develop, release_rwd to develop_rwd and develop to develop_rwd
fjfaase 8mo ago
Working without branches, except for releases, is the most effective way of working, using rebase instead of merge to get a single line of commits. Even release branches can be avoided with continuous deployment.
- locknitpicker 8mo ago
  > Working without branches, except for releases, is the most effective way of working, using rebase instead of merge to get a single line of commits. I think you're confusing workflows with commit history. You can work with feature branches all you want, rebase them as you feel like it, and then do squash merges to main. The likes of GitHub even have a button for this.
  - ahartmetz 8mo ago
    Why in the world would you do squash merges? ...except to clean up messy mini-branches written by total noobs. I don't do separate commits for funzies. If you want separate commits for ease of review, why not for later reading of the code. Assumption: above mentioned total noobs don't use git rebase -i or equivalent, everyone else does
    - aidos 8mo ago
      It’s pretty hard to keep the commits in a working branch in a good legible state - certainly it takes work to do it. In 25 years of professional development I’ve never really had a situation where the commits on a branch would have helped me understand what was going on a year ago when the work was done. That includes pretty big bits of project work. I’d much rather have a trunk with commits at the granularity of features.
      - groestl 8mo ago
        100%. I don't want to know how the sausage was made. It's similar to research papers, or history books, where the way we arrive at results or outcomes in the real world is often quite different from the way it's presented in the final form.
4pkjai 8mo ago
I worked in a team of four between 2017 and 2020 this way. I really enjoyed it. After that I joined a company that worked with PRs. Felt like such a waste of time.
ngalaiko 8mo ago
trunk based is the way to go, especially for small teams building web / backend services especially combined with monorepo amount of time people spend updating dependencies between internal services and libraries in a pursuit of semver for now reason is just absurd
- SeriousM 8mo ago
  Thats my situation. We're 5 devs for 5 years on a monorepo with about 50 services and worked on master without problems. Just from time to time a merge conflict. The only difficulty is to manage Release branch(es) with hotfixes. Discipline, Thinking and Working together, that's the magic source.
SuperJanne 8mo ago
[dead]
- handfuloflight 8mo ago
  Funny. The AI told me the same thing.
estimator7292 8mo ago
I still have nightmares from my first dev gig. We used SVN, which even in 2015 was prehistoric technology. The server was some awful rustbucket that couldn't sustain 100Mbit. Yes, it couldn't saturate basic 100megabit Ethernet. Everyone had to have big drives in their workstations to maintain multiple local trees. You just couldn't work otherwise. But probably the worst part was that when I started it was a loose organization where anyone could sneakily merge something into trunk. That changed quickly. All work was done against a develop branch, and every two weeks, the admin would DELETE THE TRUNK and recreate it from a COPY of develop. Every two weeks, we lost all history and context for changes in any given release. This was an effort to stop bugs coming back in merge regressions. Can you guess how well this worked out for them?
- yjftsjthsd-h 8mo ago
  That sounds like trunk-based development with extra steps (and only a single release branch that gets wiped every 2 weeks).
- StrangeSound 8mo ago
  Deleting the trunk every two weeks physically hurts to read. I'm always surprised by how popular SVN still is though. I ported my old Sublime SVN plugin to VS Code years ago for fun, and I still get issues raised today (usually in Chinese, so it seems popular there). If you look at the VS Code marketplace, the top SVN extension has ~1.3m installs. Bit of a tangent, but it probably wasn't a good idea to release an extension for something I had stopped using long before, particularly when you have to maintain it!
- bonesss 8mo ago
  I kinda love SVN, it was a leap up from many popular solutions at the time. And some people hate it… but, up to and including this story of random-assed deletions, scratch the surface of why and all you hear are self-inflicted harm through bad process. “Git sucks butt because at OUR shop we start a new repo every few weeks with copy n paste and don’t understand partial checkouts and under-resource the primary host server and also people sneak code into production for funsies.”… … yeah, sounds like “Git” has problems…
time4tea 8mo ago
TBD - its pretty great... aligned also with continuous deployment: It allows you to get feedback from customers very fast. It allows you to improve the software very fast. It allows you to react to the feedback you just got very fast. Yes, its tricky! You need fast builds, that give you actionable feedback on whether you did a whoopsie. Yes, it works for all sorts of things: regulated industries, incl finance, embedded systems, apps, websites, ... Yes, you do need to rethink how changes happen, to look for ways to make that big change into multiple or even many smaller changes, this often has lots of unanticipated benefits. Yes, it scales to very large deployments and quite large teams.
thr0w 8mo ago
Who cares. Prescribed workflows apply solutions from the wrong direction. Determine what's impeding your organization, devise a solution. The last guy I encountered who evangelized something like this had smart frames and a Lovecraft anthology prominently perched in the background of his Zoom shot.

I've rarely seen the first description of it where people actually commit directly to main. Except in very early stage projects. But it does always feel the fastest if you only review code "on-demand" in PRs/MRs instead of enforcing it for every change. I think in a team with good ownership, enforcing formal reviews slows down a lot. But of course in a larger code base where no single engineer can understand all the effects a change might have, having a bit of knowledge sharing and 4 eyes enforced is often the better approach than yolo-ing it. Then again I did build an SQL review tool for database access because I felt like "yolo-ing" production access was also not the way it should be. It's an interesting slider between full autonomy and strict review processes where each team needs to find their sweet spot: https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet/ https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet/

div3rs3 8mo ago
We're organized in small teams around specific products. That leads to mob programming being a good fit, so code reviews and knowledge sharing is organic. This gives us an opportunity to commit to main and do direct deploys to production. Treating every commit as deployable is key, but it drives good practices.
dxdm 8mo ago
As I understand it, trunk based development does not call for committing directly to main. It says to avoid long-lived branches for releases, whole features, etc. There's nothing wrong with small, short-lived branches that can be quickly reviewed and merged into main. That being said, I've been in a small team where the blessed style was to commit directly to main and do reviews "on demand". It quickly gets features deployed in a way that builds a lot of rot and debt into your project that people quickly lose a good understanding of. Then you just keep piling. There's probably a way to get this done properly with a tiny team of very experienced and well-aligned developers; but that's usually not what you have in an environment that pushes this kind of extreme no-review-interpretation of trunk-based development. Slow down, do reviews, avoid keeping branches open for more than a day.
- jascha_eng 8mo ago
  > well-aligned developers I think this is very key, if the development style and the direction of the project is clear, much less review and alignment is necessary. And also > avoid keeping branches open for more than a day Big +1 on that, fast reviews are extremely key. Most teams I have seen often took days or even weeks to merge branches though, often because you end up waiting too long for reviews in the first place. Or because of good old bike-shedding. But also because these code reviews often uncovered uncertainties that needed longer discussions. However usually code is easy to change, so defaulting to "just merge it" and creating followup tasks is often the cheaper approach than infinite review cycles.
  - dxdm 8mo ago
    I think it's still worth-while to do reviews. A second pair of eyes does wonders, and it spreads knowledge of what things exist and how they work. If changes are small, reviews can be quick. It's possible to keep building on top of code being reviewed, and even easy when using modern VCS tooling like jujutsu. Once the code is merged, chances are it will not get changed Those follow-up tasks will be displaced by more pressing work that will keep piling onto a slightly unstable foundation, increasing the tilt over time. There is an excluded middle between "no reviews" and "infinite review cycles": proper, timely and efficient reviews. They are worth investing the time to get right. They will start paying dividends months down the line, and boy will they keep paying. This is not about trying to get things perfect from the get go, but to get them done right while you're there. "We'll fix it later" is not gonna happen, and is much more expensive than it initially seems.
  - KronisLV 8mo ago
    > However usually code is easy to change, so defaulting to "just merge it" and creating followup tasks is often the cheaper approach than infinite review cycles. I wish this was the "default" mindset everywhere, especially in those cases where you have that one colleague that loves to nitpick everything and doesn't see an issue with holding up both releases and wasting your time over menial pedantic stuff. It would be so much easier to merge working code and let it work, and keep those TODOs in the backlog (e.g. trash). In a sane world, code review would be like: 1. Will this work and not break anything? We checked it, it's okay. There are no apparent critical or serious issues here. 2. Here's a list of stuff that you can change if you wish, here's why it might be an improvement. 3. Okay, we have some left-over nice to haves, let's keep track of those for later (or not) and merge. It gets infinitely worse if you're working on 3 projects in parallel and the person wants long winded calls or starts nitpicking about naming, or wants things done exactly their way as if it's the only way (doubly worse if their way is actually worse by most metrics and tastes).
roggenilsson 8mo ago
In my previous job we worked like this. We had one dev branch that everyone pushed directly to and the dev branch was eventually branched to an RC branch which in turn was merged to master once the release was complete. The team was small, around 6 people, and the codebase was maybe medium sized (~500k LOC). There was no formal review process, instead it was up to each team member to ensure the quality of their own and others code. In practice I would read through all commits that came in the previous day while having my morning coffee. If there was some egregious I would talk to whoever made to commit to make discuss if something should change, but this was fairly rare. Formal PR reviews were only ever really used for new members or for bigger/sketchy changes where someone wanted more eyes on it. Because I ended up reading most commits, I ended up knowing how pretty much the entire codebase worked. It takes a while for this to develop, but the more you do it the better you get at it, especially in the context of a single codebase.
maccard 8mo ago
I work in games, and we do commit directly to main. On a smaller team you can get away with pre submit review, post submit checks. On a bigger team you need pre submit checks but honestly the point where you need this is much much later than you think. One of my previous projects had 100+ people committing directly to main with no pre submit checks and jt broke once or twice a day. The builds took longer than that to go through so you just always sync to “last known good”

swiftcoder 8mo ago

stacked PRs. stacked PRs! Seriously wish the stacked PR workflow would gain more traction outside of FAANG. Apart from the (somewhat pricey) Graphite offering, there's no standard UI for managing stacked PRs in the wild.

reywilliams 8mo ago
GitHub[1] is working through this now, hopefully it leads to more adoption. [1]: https://x.com/jaredpalmer/status/2019817235163074881?s=20 https://x.com/jaredpalmer/status/2019817235163074881?s=20
- swiftcoder 8mo ago
  Damn! Can't wait
ahartmetz 8mo ago
I think Gerrit has something like stacked PRs - and incidentally it's used for Chromium and was created for running its own public open source projects by Google. It's also used by the Qt project, which is where I sometimes use it. Gerrit looks ugly and is not very easy to use at first, but at least it's not slow like GitLab and GitHub.
Hamuko 8mo ago
What's the benefit of stacked PRs?
- swiftcoder 8mo ago
  It's basically automatic rebasing of a set of PRs built on top of each other. Makes it easy to split large changes into manageable pieces that are asymmetrical for your colleagues to review individually, and makes it easy to maintain feature branches long enough to get the feature working end-to-end
amabito 8mo ago
The tooling gap exists partly because git's data model has no native concept of "this branch's upstream is another feature branch" — each PR is independent from the forge's perspective, so rebasing one layer in the stack requires manually re-targeting every PR below it. FAANG-internal tools solve this by storing the stack relationship in a metadata layer outside git itself, then regenerating the PR graph after each rebase. Without that layer, the bookkeeping falls on the developer, which is why most teams abandon the workflow after two or three levels deep regardless of how disciplined they are.

alfiedotwtf 8mo ago

The thing missing with a lot of these branch management posts is release management… because it’s lovely to live in an ideal happy-path world, but what happens when main is tagged for release, only some customers update, main moves of with multiple breaking changes, and only then do some customers require fixes to their releases (who could all be on different i.e even older tags)? Do you take their tagged release, fix it there, and then send them that branch release with the fix, or do you send them a fix on current main - you know, the main that is now a million releases ahead with multiple breaking changes? And what about all the intermediate release tags? Do you fix each one there too if they have the problem, or do you only update when customers on those releases start having that issue too? And if you fix to their old tagged release which is incompatible from main, does this mean you have to do this fix twice i.e on their tagged release and also fix it for main? But what if this fix affects other people who are all on different branches too? Now… times this by 20 different customers all running different hardware and different branches with different problems :( Maybe my comments are off topic, and don’t get me wrong - I prefer “trunk is releasable” motto, but I think maybe as an industry we should all come up with an Acid Test (like the only CSS Acid Tests) so we can through all these branching strategies into the ring

F-W-M 8mo ago
If you need to support multiple versions at the same time, you need to extend TBD in some way. We just cherry-picked stuff back to release branches, if we needed a fix.
- Zardoz84 8mo ago
  we have a "release" branch and a "develop" branch. The release is trunked on the last released version and (in theory) only gets fixes. If we need to fix a more older version, we create a temporary branch on that version to fix it, and we cherry pick the fixes (or merge to) to release branch and then to develop branch. The triple mortal loop, comes that we have two versions of the product. One with the old no responsive frontend and other with a modern responsive frontend. And we need to release and develop the two versions for sometime, before the direction decides to kill the old no responsive version. So we end with 4 branches: release, release_rwd, develop and develop_rwd. If we fix something in release, we need to do a diamond merge : release to release_rwd, release to develop, release_rwd to develop_rwd and develop to develop_rwd

fjfaase 8mo ago

Working without branches, except for releases, is the most effective way of working, using rebase instead of merge to get a single line of commits. Even release branches can be avoided with continuous deployment.

locknitpicker 8mo ago
> Working without branches, except for releases, is the most effective way of working, using rebase instead of merge to get a single line of commits. I think you're confusing workflows with commit history. You can work with feature branches all you want, rebase them as you feel like it, and then do squash merges to main. The likes of GitHub even have a button for this.
- ahartmetz 8mo ago
  Why in the world would you do squash merges? ...except to clean up messy mini-branches written by total noobs. I don't do separate commits for funzies. If you want separate commits for ease of review, why not for later reading of the code. Assumption: above mentioned total noobs don't use git rebase -i or equivalent, everyone else does
  - aidos 8mo ago
    It’s pretty hard to keep the commits in a working branch in a good legible state - certainly it takes work to do it. In 25 years of professional development I’ve never really had a situation where the commits on a branch would have helped me understand what was going on a year ago when the work was done. That includes pretty big bits of project work. I’d much rather have a trunk with commits at the granularity of features.
    - groestl 8mo ago
      100%. I don't want to know how the sausage was made. It's similar to research papers, or history books, where the way we arrive at results or outcomes in the real world is often quite different from the way it's presented in the final form.

4pkjai 8mo ago

I worked in a team of four between 2017 and 2020 this way. I really enjoyed it. After that I joined a company that worked with PRs. Felt like such a waste of time.

ngalaiko 8mo ago

trunk based is the way to go, especially for small teams building web / backend services especially combined with monorepo amount of time people spend updating dependencies between internal services and libraries in a pursuit of semver for now reason is just absurd

SeriousM 8mo ago
Thats my situation. We're 5 devs for 5 years on a monorepo with about 50 services and worked on master without problems. Just from time to time a merge conflict. The only difficulty is to manage Release branch(es) with hotfixes. Discipline, Thinking and Working together, that's the magic source.

SuperJanne 8mo ago

[dead]

handfuloflight 8mo ago
Funny. The AI told me the same thing.

estimator7292 8mo ago

I still have nightmares from my first dev gig. We used SVN, which even in 2015 was prehistoric technology. The server was some awful rustbucket that couldn't sustain 100Mbit. Yes, it couldn't saturate basic 100megabit Ethernet. Everyone had to have big drives in their workstations to maintain multiple local trees. You just couldn't work otherwise. But probably the worst part was that when I started it was a loose organization where anyone could sneakily merge something into trunk. That changed quickly. All work was done against a develop branch, and every two weeks, the admin would DELETE THE TRUNK and recreate it from a COPY of develop. Every two weeks, we lost all history and context for changes in any given release. This was an effort to stop bugs coming back in merge regressions. Can you guess how well this worked out for them?

yjftsjthsd-h 8mo ago
That sounds like trunk-based development with extra steps (and only a single release branch that gets wiped every 2 weeks).
StrangeSound 8mo ago
Deleting the trunk every two weeks physically hurts to read. I'm always surprised by how popular SVN still is though. I ported my old Sublime SVN plugin to VS Code years ago for fun, and I still get issues raised today (usually in Chinese, so it seems popular there). If you look at the VS Code marketplace, the top SVN extension has ~1.3m installs. Bit of a tangent, but it probably wasn't a good idea to release an extension for something I had stopped using long before, particularly when you have to maintain it!
bonesss 8mo ago
I kinda love SVN, it was a leap up from many popular solutions at the time. And some people hate it… but, up to and including this story of random-assed deletions, scratch the surface of why and all you hear are self-inflicted harm through bad process. “Git sucks butt because at OUR shop we start a new repo every few weeks with copy n paste and don’t understand partial checkouts and under-resource the primary host server and also people sneak code into production for funsies.”… … yeah, sounds like “Git” has problems…

time4tea 8mo ago

TBD - its pretty great... aligned also with continuous deployment: It allows you to get feedback from customers very fast. It allows you to improve the software very fast. It allows you to react to the feedback you just got very fast. Yes, its tricky! You need fast builds, that give you actionable feedback on whether you did a whoopsie. Yes, it works for all sorts of things: regulated industries, incl finance, embedded systems, apps, websites, ... Yes, you do need to rethink how changes happen, to look for ways to make that big change into multiple or even many smaller changes, this often has lots of unanticipated benefits. Yes, it scales to very large deployments and quite large teams.

thr0w 8mo ago

Who cares. Prescribed workflows apply solutions from the wrong direction. Determine what's impeding your organization, devise a solution. The last guy I encountered who evangelized something like this had smart frames and a Lovecraft anthology prominently perched in the background of his Zoom shot.