Glue code is pretty easily split up into a stack. 90% of what I’ve worked on has been glue code.

To ship your change you need to update what’s there already. Tool A needs an integration point. Tool B needs a hook added. Tool C finally joins A to B.

Implementing the bits for A and B found two useful refactorings in each codebase. At the end of it all there was also some dead code.

That’s 8 commits. The downside is you end up yak shaving a lot.

You have to fix a lot of merge conflicts. I used this workflow at AWS -- code reviews can take some time, you're writing a lot of code, and you want your CRs to be small.

If someone leaves a comment on the CR for the first branch you fix the issue and rebase. It's not fun, but this is the only effective way to do it (that I know of).

So are the 10 branches mostly yours then? That seems slightly less crazy.

Yup. I rarely even pushed the branches — they’re local branches

Many FB devs don't use branches or maybe use one branch with the entire stack.

What you're describing is sometimes a problem but often not really one.