Day Seven of Devdose
Most developers know what Git is, but not everyone uses it in a way that truly supports clean, thoughtful engineering. This post isn’t a Git primer. It’s a look at a few habits I’ve adopted to avoid chaos in day-to-day coding.
A Few Practices That Have Stuck
One habit I’ve grown to rely on is merging frequently, ideally every hour or two. This keeps changes small, encourages working in safe, testable increments, and reduces the chance of painful merge conflicts. It also forces me to think about how to integrate unfinished work without breaking anything. That might mean wrapping logic in feature flags or using conditional rendering to isolate updates until they’re ready.
I also try to keep atomic commits. A commit should do one thing, whether that’s renaming a method or adding a new function. This habit makes code reviews cleaner and makes it easier to understand history later.
My Personal Merge Workflow
I avoid rebasing in most cases. Instead, I use a simple pattern that’s worked well in team settings:
# Rename old working branch
git branch -m feature-a-old
# Checkout fresh master and pull latest
git checkout master
git pull
# Recreate working branch and merge old changes
git checkout -b feature-a
git merge feature-a-oldThis keeps my branch history simple, avoids rebase conflicts, and makes my changes easier to review. Some might argue that rebasing is cleaner. I find this approach more predictable and easier to manage, especially under pressure.
The Bigger Picture
None of this is about mastering every Git command. It’s about building small, repeatable habits that protect your focus and your team’s sanity. You don’t need to know every edge case, but you do need to commit intentionally and communicate clearly through your commits and merges.
Takeaway
Git isn’t just a tool to back up your work. It’s an opportunity to improve how you think about change. Small merges, clean commits, and a calm workflow go a long way in making codebases and teams more resilient.