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"You submitted a pull request."
Indika was, in fact, reviewing the comments she'd gotten on that very same pull request, when her boss, Bill, walked up behind her. What she didn't understand is why Bill said it like it was an accusation.
"Yes?" she replied.
"Okay, well, we don't do that here. You're new, so I'll let it slide, but please review the developer guide."
Well, Indika had reviewed the developer guide, or at least thought she had. As it turned out, there was the official, company wide developer guide. That's the one she'd read. But Bill maintained his own, for his team. He hadn't ever told her about it, but apparently assumed she'd have the oracular blessings of Apollo and find it by herself.
It had this to say:
Branching is prohibited. Merging is a time wasting activity and goes against CI principles. Only use
gitto commit, push, and pull.
And rebase, presumably, if everyone was just committing on the main branch?
Indika asked one of her co-workers, Elise, over coffee: "Is this real?"
"Yeah," Elise said. "I'm not sure how he found out about your PR, I don't think anybody added him to the review. I mean, why would they?"
"Oh, I sent him the link," Indika said. "Just a whole, 'I'm new here, look at me doing the work!' type heads up."
"Oh yeah, definitely don't do that."
"So we do use PRs?"
Elise nodded. "Of course we do. We're not crazy. We just make sure Bill never finds out."
That seemed like a terrible way to work, but Indika went along with it, at least for a few weeks. Then an opportunity presented itself; she and Bill bumped into each other in the kitchenette grabbing coffee, and nobody else was around. At this point, Indika had already submitted a number of PRs without Bill knowing.
"Bill, I've been meaning to ask, what's your rationale for prohibiting branching?"
Bill loved being asked that question. "Well, well, it comes from twenty years of experience. What exactly does a branch get you?"
"A distinct history of changes that can be maintained and eventually merged in once a large unit of work has been done without disrupting other work that might be in flight?"
"Another point of conflict! A chance for the code you're working on to get stale. A chance to fall behind the rest of the team. Now, for a large open source team, with a lot of collaborators, a branch might make sense. I'm skeptical, but I can at least understand it. But for our internal team? It's just developers seeing a new toy and going, 'oh, shiny!'"
Indika sipped her coffee and went back to her desk. She was fortunate to have a window nearby, and looked at the squirrels playing in the branches of the tree.
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