Git branching strategy for small teams

For a small team, I recommend GitHub Flow — it's simple and effective:

The entire strategy:

1. main branch is always deployable
2. Create feature branches from main: feat/add-search, fix/sidebar-layout
3. Push and open a PR (or just push directly for solo projects)
4. Merge to main when ready
5. Deploy from main

Commit convention (Conventional Commits):

textCopy
feat: add conversation search API
fix: correct sidebar collapse on mobile
docs: update deployment guide
refactor: extract sync validation logic

Why NOT Git Flow for small teams:

• Too many branches (develop, release, hotfix) = overhead
• Solo/2-person teams don't need the ceremony
• GitHub Flow gives you 90% of the benefit with 10% of the complexity

Pro tip: Use main + feature branches. Skip develop/staging branches until you actually need them. You can always add complexity later, but removing it is harder.