New SuiteCRM Developer - Which branch to work in?

Greetings everyone!

I’ve been doing some (mostly internal) development with SuiteCRM, and now I’m branching out and posting pull requests to the project. My first accepted pull request was just released with 7.10.6! Yay!

Anyway, I’m getting familiar with Git, as it works with upstream projects (I’ve been using it for years on my own one-man projects) and I have a question…

When I create a new branch to start developing a feature or a bug fix, which upstream branch should I base it on? Master? Hotfix? Something else? I’m trying to avoid merge conflicts when I post a pull request.

I would also like to have some (clear) clarification and a small tutorial on this subject.

I have a few contributions but I am not familiar enough with gitHub.

In the past I contributed something using the web interface but now I am unsure on what to do because my branch is obsolete. Furthermore one of my (un)committed changes had an error and when trying to correct it I was afraid of messing something else up. My other doubt is about a few other contributions I started entering. Will I lose them?

Sorry but I have had no time so far to study how gitHub works!