Blog: Git Good - The magic of keeping a clean Git history
This post is designed to help you form a solid mental model while working with Git both professionally and in an open source project, and how to ensure you are following best practices to make the process easier for everyone.
This topic was inspired by some of my pairing sessions with my colleague Tobias Bieniek and the concepts laid out in this post have become invaluable to me while working with open source development. If you haven't already checked out Tobias' blog on Open Source maintenance I would highly recommend checking it out after reading this post 🎉
Git can sometimes be complex to get your head around. Most of us learn Git up to a point where we're happy to use it day-to-day and then stick to the few commands that we are comfortable with without trying anything too fancy. Most of the time this works out, but then every so often we do something wrong or someone asks us to rebase or "squash" something and we either panic and/or mess up our git repo 😫 This is such a common feeling that sites like Oh shit, git! have cropped up to help us get out of our messes.
It's my belief that a number of factors have held developers back from becoming super productive with Git, and with a bit of guidance in pairing sessions I can usually help people to unlock their full potential while using Git. This potential I am talking about is not anything so complex as dealing with the reflog, or knowing anything about blobs or the internals of Git, I am just talking about people feeling comfortable understanding branches, rebasing, cherrypicking, and have the ability to clean up a branch before submitting it to a Pull Request (PR).
