Source Control for Solo Developers

If a source control check-in happens when there’s only one developer, does it still need to be on a branch?

I wondered if I was creating too much process and administrivia for myself. I suppose I could have kept going with the manual backups, or even run some shell scripts to automate it, but recently I discovered that my answer is to this question is an overwhelming YES!

Without Git and the ability to create and work in branches, my site would have quick degenerated to a steaming pile of half-baked ideas that might never have compiled in Jekyll again. In the past two months I have successfully used branches to isolate work on three distinct and seemingly brilliant ideas that each have the potential for significant impact on my site. To date I’ve only committed one to production, in the form of a revision to my January 4th post listing my current Maker book collection. This was my first attempt at using a data file in Jekyll to generate a page’s content (more on this later). I continue working on the other ideas and will let you know when/if they go live.