In Praise of Stacked PRs

See, I disagree, because this is absolutely the place where it helps the most—you can now go away and keep working on the same task without having to context switch to anything else or remember where you were or what you were working on. So you're never in a state where you're blocked and can't work on your ticket, and you don't have anything else to do or have to pick up another ticket and start learning about a whole completely separate problem. (And yes, definitely everything still needs to be written down, it's important to walk away knowing which changes you need to make, and why!)

> it might still be some time before your coworker has available time to participate in such a session, so it's still likely you'll need something else to work on in the mean time.

In teams I've worked on, the expectation is that an engineers highest priority is always unblocking another engineer, so this very rarely happened. Unless they had an interview to go to or some kind of meeting—and in that case, you could always just ping somebody else.

Obviously it's a style of work that relies really heavily on everyone sharing the same timezone and work hours, but it works really well to eliminate time lost to context switching and minimize the amount of time engineers spend blocked waiting on someone else.

[1] https://stacked-git.github.io/

But at the very least there's still an existing remote branch, which is the ultimate merge target, for example - perhaps even multiple. Since we're talking about coordination, there's also the actual state at the remote vs. my view of the remote vs. my teammates' views of the remote. But we don't think about this too much, because we can synchronize easily as long as the remote branch has a name. Taking the name off the branch makes it more difficult to do anything with someone else's work other than merge it, e.g. pass a changeset back and forth or hand over a half-complete task.

> why do we also use the command `git stash`, instead of just always creating a new branch for our temporary work?

I have no idea actually, because I don't. I haven't run git stash manually since I learned about autostash, and even before that it wasn't for temporary work but for changes I decided I wanted somewhere else only after writing them. Temporary work mostly does get a branch (usually as a new commit on top of my current local branch).

> If I'm understanding correctly, every time you rebase the longest branch, for each commit in the branch, you would manually run e.g. `git push origin:my-branch-name`?

Close, except I'd scroll down the list of commits and type `P o RET TAB branch-name` (or something to that effect, it'd be slightly different if I have several remotes). This would take perhaps ~0.5 seconds per branch and not require me to context switch to a terminal.

It does take longer for people using less powerful clients, but virtually all do provide some way to do it even it means a few right-clicks on a menu and clicking some "OK" buttons, and there's value in everyone using analogous operations. And the people using those clients usually can't reliably recover from a large class of "git broke" mistakes, assistance from git-branchless or not, so handing them a CLI and a prayer is out of the question. And even the "long version" is pretty negligible (like, maybe 10 seconds per branch?) compared to everything else you should do to make your changeset approachable for review.

I've only ever found this workflow to work if you can attach multiple commits/code reviews to single higher-level work items in your project management software. There's simply too much overhead if you try to correlate project management items one-to-one with commits/code reviews.