Hiya friends,
Most of us live on git add, git commit, and git push. We get the job done, PRs move, code ships. But there's a whole tier of Git knowledge sitting right there that saves hours and keeps your history clean, your debugging faster, and your reviews sharper. This week we're pulling together the git fundamentals that actually change how you work.
💡 the commands most people miss
Command | What it does | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Shows every commit you've ever checked out. Find the one you want, | After a bad reset or rebase when everything feels broken, before you throw it all away. |
| Binary-searches your history to find the exact commit that introduced a bug. | Debugging regressions instead of scrolling 200 commits. |
| Dumps a commit's metadata and diff in one go. | Faster than clicking GitHub. |
| Visual ASCII graph of branch history, way easier to read than raw logs. | Understanding branch structure at a glance. |
| Deletes untracked files and directories. Not | Full cleanup before pushing. |
| Drops deleted remote branches from your local tracking. | Stop chasing |
🚢 What shipped
GitHub Actions workflow dispatch workflows jumped from 10 inputs to 25. Before: you'd squash environment, database, feature_flags, version, and region into one messy JSON blob. Now you get clean, separate inputs.
on:
workflow_dispatch:
inputs:
environment:
description: 'Deployment environment'
type: choice
options: [dev, staging, prod]
required: true
database:
description: 'Database connection string'
type: string
feature_flags:
description: 'Feature flags to enable'
type: string
required: false
version:
description: 'Application version to deploy'
type: string
required: true
region:
description: 'AWS region'
type: choice
options: [us-east-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1]
🎧 What I’m Listening to
The Courage to Be Disliked - Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
A dialogue between a philosopher and a young person about Adlerian psychology. It pulls you in with ideas that flip how you usually think about life. Made me reconsider why we build the way we do and how fear shapes decisions, both in code and in life. Fair warning: the book dismisses trauma as a choice and can sound mean. Take what lands, leave what doesn't.
Worth your time if: You like questioning your assumptions and want a contrarian take on psychology and relationships.
🔧 What I'm Using
Just compressed a 4.3GB podcast video down to streaming-ready size using FFmpeg. If you're working with video or audio, FFmpeg is “goated”. Full disclosure I gave the copilot CLI my file path and it gave me all the commands I needed (which I then reviewed so sad things would not occur). Good robot 🤖.
✨ This week
I'm ready for time off and full 🎄holiday mode. But there's still work to be done before the year closes, and companies are doing so much right now. Are you actually able to shut down? Already in vacation mode? Hit reply and tell me, I want to live vicariously through you.
That's it. Git fundamentals that actually save you time.
Forward this to your team if it was useful. Reply and tell me what you actually want to read about if it wasn't.
With gratitude, I'll see you next week,
Andrea
P.S. - MCP servers and AI agents are getting smarter. But if you don't know git reflog when something breaks, you're stuck. Tools change. Git fundamentals don't. Know your commands.
P.S.S. - Huge thanks to Brian Rinaldi and the CFE team for the years of free quality events.