Slides

Live at Head: Trunk-Based Development

Why long-lived branches hurt, how trunk-based development fixes it, and the tooling that makes it safe at scale.

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February 28, 2026

Slide 1 — The Problem: Long-Lived Branches

Every team starts the same way: a release/2.4 branch cut three weeks ago, a feature/new-checkout that diverged from main two sprints back, and a "quick" hotfix that somehow lives in its own branch for a month.

The longer a branch lives, the further it drifts from main — and from every other branch.

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The pain you feel at merge time is interest on the debt you accumulated by branching. Long-lived branches don't defer risk — they compound it.