UPDATE: punch shared this talk of Sam Newman from goto; 2017 with me and it had a nice insight about where branches helps and about trunk based development. After watching it, I feel for personal and individual projects, branching and reviews adds unnecessary overhead. Its better to stick to trunk based development, it keeps momentum going and project moving, and gives a good morale boost.

At Senic we are working on next product which started with simple prototype hack of a new integration and a demo around it. But since then, as we are nearing the "launch", work/code still has not come out of its Feature Branch. I have been rebasing my commits on top of latest mainline branch development, but still there is something which makes me feel very uncomfortable around this parallel development. Somehow I have this perception of ideal project with a single branch and the ease with which new feature gets merged is good sign and something to be aspired for.

Issue -> Pull Request -> Review -> Approvals -> Merge.

But in case of feature branch, this starts happening in parallel and for me personally as I work on feature/bug, it ends up spilling into next feature/bug and so on and so forth. This creates branches off of feature branch where feature for feature branch is there and my head is already hurting while putting this thought in words.

On one of my personal project, SoFee, I have been using mozilla's javascript based readability library to get cleaned up url content. Lately I came across newspaper3k, python based library which can do the same and it would make backend code more coherent. This is fairly simple feature which can follow the path of the Pull Request method I mentioned above, but as I started working on it, I came across a bug in my usage of twitter API and I got it sorted out, I had to do changes in models and few other things. I am not able to clearly demark zone of these smaller developments and they keep spilling into each other and that ends up leaving very entangled history which totally drains out the enthusiasm. Someday, we will master this art of project management…