So, why don’t we use git-flow at GitHub? Well, the main issue is that we deploy all the time. The git-flow process is designed largely around the “release”. We don’t really have “releases” because we deploy to production every day - often several times a day. We can do so through our chat room robot, which is the same place our CI results are displayed. We try to make the process of testing and shipping as simple as possible so that every employee feels comfortable doing it.

There are a number of advantages to deploying so regularly. If you deploy every few hours, it’s almost impossible to introduce large numbers of big bugs. Little issues can be introduced, but then they can be fixed and redeployed very quickly. Normally you would have to do a ‘hotfix’ or something outside of the normal process, but it’s simply part of our normal process - there is no difference in the GitHub flow between a hotfix and a very small feature.