You seem to regard programming as the act of writing code. I, however, view programming as the act of creating software. And using branches heavily definitely h

You seem to regard programming as the act of writing code. I, however, view programming as the act of creating software. And using branches heavily definitely helps me to be better at creating software. Having small feature-specific branches makes it much easier for others to review my code, which increases the quality of the code that gets merged. Improvements in code quality seems like a pretty good definition of getting better as a programmer.