[campo]

I absolutely agree with this. I recently started working on a small web app as a side project. I was dealing with a lot of elements that were new to me and was constantly pushing the limits of my knowledge and breaking things. I realized I wasn't using the power git provided me with branches.

Once I started branching things got quicker and more effective because I could bounce between tasks without affecting my deployment (master branch). In five days of frantic coding using git branching I now have a clean easy deployment of about 750 lines, which I iterated on through four different branches and, probably over 3000 lines of code.

It's not perfect, but it's eliminated any apprehension about aggressively changing my application, and made me far more ambitious. I feel great about it.

[th0ma5]

I've had a similar feeling of empowerment, although less structured. With hobby projects where sometimes I realize I was thinking all wrong about a certain solution, I'll just check in what I have and commence the deleting of large blocks. Occasionally I'll go back and find something that maybe was a good idea, but for the most part, having an excuse to part ways with bad ideas has alone been really great.

[campo]

That's great, reducing the barrier to entry for new projects allows for more experimentation. More experimentation increases the likelihood you'll stumble upon something you really like!

What I meant to say more clearly is that I probably iterated through the creation of that web application so quickly because in five days I committed to git 75 times. In my time at Microsoft I don't know that I would have made 75 commits in a year, and creating new branches was very costly.

I got numbers on my git repository by using GitStats: http://gitstats.sourceforge.net/