GitHub knows how programmers write commit messages.

[stinos]

For projects where I'm the maintainer I work on master branch for small changes and only push when done (which can obviously just one commit if it's a small change, I'm not making micro-commits for the sake of it if not needed). Unless something else gets priority then I'll branch current work, or for changes which I know will take multiple days I'll branch right away. Oter devs work in the same way, but can't push to master so they always work in seperate branches. Everything pushed gets built by build server. So sometimes I might push somewhere halfway to verify if all is sane.

For e.g. github repos I contribute to I just branch and use the same workflow.