Add daily email for 2024-02-25

Why do people still use Git Flow?

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+---
+title: Why do people still use Git Flow?
+date: 2024-02-25
+permalink: archive/2024/02/25/why-do-people-still-use-git-flow
+snippet: |
+    Why do people still use Git Flow in 2024?
+tags:
+    - software-development
+    - git
+cta: d7eol
+---
+
+[The first conference talk I gave][talk] was at DrupalCamp London 2014.
+
+The talk was about Git Flow - a popular branching scheme I was using to manage a project, where there are different branches for development and production versions of the software and separate branches for features, releases and hotfixes.
+
+It's been a standard approach as I've worked on different projects and teams, usually with pull or merge requests and code reviews.
+
+But why do people still use it?
+
+I was conducting technical interviews recently and every candidate explained how they used Git Flow or something inspired by it, and GitHub and GitLab have their own simplified versions.
+
+Vincent Driessen wrote the original Git Flow blog post in January 2010, though he updated it in March 2020 to add this note of reflection:
+
+> This model was conceived in 2010, now more than 10 years ago, and not very long after Git itself came into being. In those 10 years, git-flow (the branching model laid out in this article) has become hugely popular in many a software team to the point where people have started treating it like a standard of sorts — but unfortunately also as a dogma or panacea.
+>
+> During those 10 years, Git itself has taken the world by a storm, and the most popular type of software that is being developed with Git is shifting more towards web apps — at least in my filter bubble. Web apps are typically continuously delivered, not rolled back, and you don't have to support multiple versions of the software running in the wild.
+> 
+> This is not the class of software that I had in mind when I wrote the blog post 10 years ago. If your team is doing continuous delivery of software, I would suggest to adopt a much simpler workflow (like GitHub flow) instead of trying to shoehorn git-flow into your team.
+> 
+> If, however, you are building software that is explicitly versioned, or if you need to support multiple versions of your software in the wild, then git-flow may still be as good of a fit to your team as it has been to people in the last 10 years. In that case, please read on.
+> 
+> To conclude, always remember that panaceas don't exist. Consider your own context. Don't be hating. Decide for yourself.
+
+Since adopting trunk-based development and continuous integration and delivery, I've worked faster and avoided merge conflicts, which wasn't the case before, even when I was the only one working on a codebase.
+
+It's a simpler workflow.
+
+I don't need to think about whether this branch is a feature or a hotfix, and I've rarely seen release and hotfix branches used as described in the original blog post.
+
+## Here's the thing
+
+Do what works best for you and your team, but don't adopt something because it's the "standard" approach.
+
+[talk]: {{site.url}}/talks/git-flow