GitHub Protips: Tips, tricks, hacks, and secrets from Sarah Vessels

Sarah Vessels, a GitHub engineer, shares her strategy for managing large pull requests by initially coding all changes in a single branch and later extracting smaller, more focused branches for review. This approach allows her to maintain creative flow and verify that her code functions as expected before organizing it into bite-sized, easily reviewable segments. Vessels uses git cherry-pick and GitHub's pull request features to separate atomic changes into distinct branches, ensuring thorough testing and reducing the cognitive load on reviewers. By "daisy-chaining" these smaller branches, she creates a sequence where each branch builds on the previous one, allowing for efficient merging once dependencies are resolved. This method balances her desire for an uninterrupted coding process with the need for manageable and well-reviewed code integration, ultimately improving team collaboration and code quality.