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Pieter Hintjens is a writer, programmer and thinker who has spent decades building large software systems and on-line communities, which he describes as "Living Systems". He is an expert in distributed computing, having written over 30 protocols and distributed software systems. He designed AMQP in 2004, and founded the ZeroMQ free software project in 2007.

He is the author of the O'Reilly ZeroMQ book, "Culture and Empire", "The Psychopath Code", "Social Architecture", and "Confessions of a Necromancer." In April 2016 he was diagnosed with terminal metastasis of a previous cancer.

Git Branches Considered Harmful
One of git's great features is how easy it makes branches. Almost all git projects use branches, and the selection of the "best" branching strategy is like a rite of passage for an open source project. Vincent Driessen's git-flow is maybe the best known. It has 'base' branches (master, develop), 'feature' branches, 'release' branches, 'hotfix' branches, and 'support' branches. Many teams have adopted git-flow, which even has git extensions to support it. However, in this article I'll argue that public git branches are harmful, based on experience and evidence, and propose a branch-free approach, based on forks.

09 May 2012 21:49 | 9 Comments | 0

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