Trunk-Based Development

Server-side rules that stop people from pushing straight to important branches, requiring reviews, passing checks, and intact history instead.

The convention governing what branches exist, what they mean, and how work reaches production.

Copying the change from one commit onto another branch as a new commit, the standard way to backport a fix without merging everything else that came with it.

Automatically releasing every change that passes validation.

Automatically building and testing every change, so integration problems surface immediately.

Systems tend to reproduce the communication structure of the organization that built them.

The two basic ways Git joins branches, by sliding a branch pointer forward or by recording a new commit with two parents, and how the choice shapes a project's history.

A branch created to develop one change in isolation before merging it back, a workflow that keeps the main line stable but grows riskier the longer the branch lives, since its divergence from everyone else's work compounds.

A runtime switch that decouples shipping code from enabling behavior.

Git's shelf for uncommitted work, which clears the working tree so you can switch tasks, and the reasons a throwaway commit or a second worktree is often the better shelf.

An urgent fix shipped outside the normal release flow, how teams branch and backport it, and why the healthiest hotfix process is the normal process run fast.

Overlapping changes that a merge cannot combine automatically, requiring a decision.

Validating changes against the state they will actually merge into, in order, rather than in isolation.

A proposal to merge a branch, carrying review, automated checks, and the discussion around it.

Replaying a branch's commits onto a new base, producing new commits with the same changes.

Shipping on a fixed schedule whether or not a given feature is ready, so features that miss one release simply wait for the next instead of holding everyone back.

Two changes that merge cleanly and are incompatible in meaning.

Collapsing a branch's commits into one before merging, trading granularity for a clean main history.

Combining two lines of work by comparing both against their common ancestor.