Improving Your Confidence with Git

Learning your way around git can be overwhelming. There are a lot of commands and it can feel like you have to master them all to be productive. The good news is it’s less overwhelming than you think and there is an escape hatch while you ramp up.

1. 80/20 It — you can totally “80/20”. 80/20 also known as the Pareto principle is getting good at 20% of commands you can use in 80% of situations. Of the 185* git commands, you really only need to know ~10 to be productive: add, commit, pull, push, checkout, clone, and merge.
2. It’s Just a Program — I often refer folks to this article from The Recurse Center. The TLDR is … git is just a program and one that you could implement. I remember reading this for the first time and breathing a sigh of relief. It’s not that complex under the hood.
3. Don’t Be Embarrassed to Manually Back Up Your Work — There no shame in checking out a branch or even manually copy-pasting the files onto your desktop while you are getting your skills up. I used to do this quite often before performing whatever git maneuver I was attempting. This is completely fine! Losing your work is way worse.

Once you realize there is less surface area to cover, that it’s just a program, and get some practice in on the most useful commands, I hope you feel less stressed by git and that you more or less feel like you git it.I would love to hear if any of these tips helped you feel a little less overwhelmed on your software engineering journey.

*Counted by running git help -a | wc on the command line