At one of the clients I’m helping, I did something last week that made me feel slightly bad.

I merged a pull request that refactored a couple database methods.

Why did I feel bad?

Because it broke another developer’s work in progress.

He end up with some accidental reversions, due to bad merge conflict resolution, and ultimately ended up completely abandoning a week-old feature branch and starting from scratch.

But then again, I felt only slightly bad. Why only slightly?

Because the real failure here wasn’t my refactor, it was the week-old feature branch.

Today I started coaching this other developer on the how-and-why of real continuous integration: the practice of merging into master multiple times per day.

I started with the simple guideline: He should be merging a minimum of one of your PRs each day. So I asked him to make small PRs, and not worry if the feature is complete, only that each PR works.

🤞