As a Frontend Engineer at Superside, we have about 60+ members worldwide working on the codebase day-to-day, around the clock. In a fast-paced environment, version control is the backbone of my workflow.

Over the past year, I have come to rely on several key Git commands that have greatly improved my efficiency and collaboration with teammates. In this blog post, I will share my most used Git commands and explain how they have enhanced my development process.

Less of Git Merge, More of Git Rebase

• In a big company with constant code changes, keeping my branch up to date is crucial. Instead of relying heavily on git merge, I have found git rebase to be more suitable in such scenarios.
• With code being pushed frequently throughout the day, using git merge can clutter the commit tree and make it difficult to review changes. I reserve git merge specifically for merging branches into the master.
• In an ideal scenario, automated pipelines handle the branch-to-master merges, making it easier to manage and review code changes.

It is also good practice to perform git rebase on your branch with the master branch before asking for reviews and eventually get it approved and deployed for few things:

• To make sure all unit tests are updated in your branch, to avoid coverage report errors.
• To make sure merge conflicts are dealt with beforehand, and save yourself from crying later.
• There could be potential fixes that has been pushed after you created your branch that might come in handy during those blocking moments.

In summary, I use git rebase from the master branch to keep my branch up to date and git merge to merge my branch into the master branch.

Git Cherry Pick

• There are instances where I need to incorporate specific commits from one branch into another without merging the entire branch. This is where git cherry-pick comes in handy.
• By using git cherry-pick, I can select individual commits and apply them to my current branch, saving time and effort in managing separate branches.

In a real life situation, you might be working on branch, only to know that you have been breaking a lot of stuff. You might accidentally removed an important commit by another engineer during a rebase, or accidentally pushed a commit at a wrong branch. This can be handy. You wanna know why I know? I was there…

Squashing Commits

• To maintain a clean and concise commit history, I often squash my commits before merging or pushing my changes.
• Squashing commits allows me to combine multiple related commits into a single commit, making it easier to understand and review the changes.

This is really useful when you have over 20 commits in your branch and depending on your pipelines, having too much commits can sometime break one of your pipelines. Broke the unit testing pipeline when my MR had over 30 commits. Believe me, squashing helps.

Less Reliance on GUI, Terminal is the way.

• I have found it more efficient to rely on command-line tools for most Git operations.
• VSCode & Webstorm’s Git interface is cool, but having to move my hand to my mouse and click buttons have made it inefficient for me for all the microseconds I lost.
• Working with the CLI enables me to quickly execute commands, navigate through branches, and visualize the commit history, all without leaving the terminal.

—force vs —force-with-lease

• To keep my branch up to date with the latest changes from the remote repository, I often use git pull --rebase instead of a simple git pull.
• After rebasing, I use git push --force-with-lease to safely push my changes to the remote repository, ensuring I do not overwrite any unintentional updates made by my teammates.
• I only use git push --force on my personal projects or any projects that don’t involve 10 other engineers.

These are the Git commands & practices that have become an integral part of my daily development workflow over the past year. By leveraging git rebase for keeping branches up to date, utilizing git cherry-pick for selective commits, squashing commits for cleaner history, relying on the CLI, and mastering rebasing and git push options, I have streamlined my version control process for efficient collaboration.

Remember, Git is a powerful tool that offers numerous features and commands to adapt to different development scenarios. Experiment, explore, and find the commands that work best for your workflow.

Happy coding and collaborating!