Dev vs Main: How We Ship Without Breaking the Live Site

The short version

• A "branch" is a working copy of your code you can change safely, without touching the version everyone else is using.
• We run two: "dev," where new work happens and gets tested, and "main," the version that is actually live on peopleintheloop.app.
• Nothing reaches "main" by accident. It moves over on purpose, once it has been tested and approved.
• This is post two in a short series. The first covered what GitHub is. The next covers environment variables in Netlify.

The problem branches solve

Imagine a restaurant kitchen with exactly one working stove, and every dish that touches it goes straight out to a paying customer. There is no test batch. If a new recipe is wrong, a real customer finds out. That is what building directly on a live website is like, with no separation between "trying something" and "everyone sees it."

A test kitchen fixes that. You try the new recipe there first. You taste it, adjust it, get it right. Only once it actually works does it go out to the dining room. That test kitchen is what a "dev" branch is. The dining room is "main."

What dev and main actually are, in plain terms

Q: What is a branch?

A branch is a separate, working copy of the code. Changes made on one branch do not affect any other branch until you deliberately combine them ("merge," in developer language).

Q: What is the difference between dev and main?

"Main" is the branch that is actually live, the version real visitors see at peopleintheloop.app. "Dev" is where new work happens and gets reviewed first. Nothing goes to main without going through dev.

Q: Why not just work directly on main?

Because every change would be instantly live, tested or not. A typo, a broken page, a half-finished feature, all of it would be visible to everyone immediately. Dev gives you a safe place to build and check work before it matters.

The whole point of separating dev and main is that "I am trying something" and "this is now real" are never the same moment.

How this actually works at People in the Loop

We run this with three layers, not two, because we added one more safety net on top of the basic dev-and-main idea.

1. Dev is the default working branch. Nearly everything gets built here first.
2. Dev has its own live preview, a real, working version of the site that only we can see, so we can click through actual changes before anyone else does, not just read the code.
3. Main is production, peopleintheloop.app itself. Dev only moves to main on purpose, either automatically overnight once dev has been stable, or immediately when I say "ship it now."

That preview step is the part people skip and regret. It is the difference between reading a recipe and actually tasting the dish.

What is coming next in this series

Branches solve "where do changes happen safely." The next question is "how does the code know which settings to use in which place," because dev and main sometimes need different secrets and settings too, not just different code. Environment variables are for that, and it is the next post in this series.

Key terms glossary

Branch: a separate, working copy of a project's code.

Dev branch: where new work happens and gets tested before it is live.

Main branch: the live, production version everyone actually sees.

Merge: combining changes from one branch into another, on purpose.

Deploy preview: a real, working version of a specific branch, viewable before it goes live.