🔁 A day in the life (plus your final quiz)

Every tool you learned, snapped together into one calm daily rhythm.

1The loop professionals run every day

You now know photos, bookmarks, the cloud copy, and pull requests. Here is the secret: professionals do not use them as separate tricks. They run them as one loop, over and over, every single day.

🥖 It is like a baker's morning. Same steps in the same order: preheat, mix, proof, bake, clean up. The bread changes daily, the routine never does. Once the routine is in your hands, your brain is free to think about the bread.

Start fresh. git switch main, then git pull. You begin the day with the team's latest album.
New bookmark. git switch -c my-task. One task, one bookmark.
Work in small bites. Edit, git add, git commit. Repeat. Photos are free, take lots.
Share it. git push -u origin my-task sends your line of photos to the cloud copy.
Open the PR. Ask a teammate to look.
Answer the review. Push more commits to the same branch. The PR updates itself.
It gets merged. Squash or merge, the team picks one style.
Come home. Back to main, git pull, and your merged work arrives. Delete the old bookmark. The loop restarts.

🗣 Git people call this loop "GitHub flow." Pull, branch, commit, push, pull request, merge, pull again. When a job posting says "comfortable with GitHub flow," it means this exact circle, nothing fancier.

2One tiny feature, end to end

Here is the whole loop for one real-feeling task: adding a contact link to a website footer. Read it for rhythm, not detail. Notice how small and boring each step is. Boring is the goal.

# Monday, 9:02am. Today's task: add a footer link.
git switch main
git pull
Already up to date.  # fresh start from the team's latest
git switch -c footer-link
# ...edit footer.html in your editor...
git add footer.html
git commit -m "Add contact link so visitors can reach support"
git push -u origin footer-link
branch 'footer-link' set up to track 'origin/footer-link'
# open the PR on GitHub. teammate asks: "make it a mailto link?"
git commit -am "Use mailto: so the link opens email"
git push
# PR approved and merged on GitHub 🎉
git switch main
git pull  # your link comes home
git branch -d footer-link  # old bookmark, no longer needed

⌨️ Try it yourself

Run the offline half of the loop right now in your playground. No GitHub needed, the muscle memory is the point.

cd /tmp/git-playground
git switch main
git switch -c practice-loop
echo "hello loop" >> notes.txt
git add notes.txt
git commit -m "Practice one lap of the daily loop"
git switch main
git merge practice-loop
git branch -d practice-loop  # one full lap, done

3The golden rules

If this course had morals, these are them. Six habits that prevent almost every git headache:

Pull before you start. Begin every task from the team's latest photos, not yesterday's.
Branch for every task. A bookmark costs nothing. Main stays calm and clean.
Commit small and often. Photos are free. Ten small save points beat one giant one.
Write "why" notes. The sticky note on each photo should explain the reason, not just the action.
Never force-push a shared branch. Rewriting photos other people already have causes the only real chaos git knows.
When unsure, run git status, then breathe. Committed work is almost impossible to lose. Almost everything is recoverable.

4When you get stuck

You will get stuck sometimes. Everyone does, forever. Here is the four-step ritual:

Run git status and actually read it. Git is chatty in a helpful way. The message usually names the exact fix, often with the command spelled out.
Breathe. Your photos are safe. If you committed it, it exists, even when the screen looks scary.
Avoid --force and --hard. Those spells can throw real work away, and so can the quieter git restore. Stuck is temporary. Unphotographed is forever: committed photos can almost always be rescued, even after a bad force, but edits you never photographed cannot.
Open the panic section. The Reference page translates the common scary messages into plain English, one by one.

⚠️ A stuck moment never requires deleting your project folder and starting over. If you are tempted to do that, stop and check the Reference page first. The fix is almost always two commands.

5The final quiz

Five questions, one from each big idea of the course. These are real situations, not vocabulary. Take your time.

Q1. You changed three files, but only one of them belongs in your next save point. What do you do?

The staging area is a shopping basket: you choose exactly what goes into the next photo. git add picks the one file, git commit takes the photo, and the other changes simply stay in your working folder, unharmed.

Q2. Your branch was merged into main, and you ran git branch -d to delete it. A wave of panic: did deleting the branch delete your work?

A branch is a bookmark, not a copy. Deleting the bookmark removes a label, never the photos. After a merge, your commits live in main's history. That is exactly why deleting merged branches is normal, safe housekeeping.

Q3. You run git merge and the screen says: CONFLICT in footer.html. What just happened?

A conflict is a question, not an error. Both versions are sitting right there in the file between the markers. You choose what to keep, then git add and git commit to record your answer. Nothing was lost at any point.

Q4. Yesterday you committed something broken, pushed it, and teammates already pulled it. What is the safe undo?

Once others have a photo, you never rip it out of the album: that is rewriting shared history and breaks everyone's copy. git revert adds a new commit that cancels the bad one. History stays honest, teammates just pull as usual.

Q5. A reviewer on your pull request asks for changes. How do you respond?

A PR is a living conversation attached to a branch. Any new commits you push to that branch appear in the PR instantly. The review thread, comments, and approvals all stay in one place.

6Where to go next

Use git on a real personal project this week. Not the playground, something you actually care about. That is the only way the loop becomes reflex instead of recipe.
Read the Reference page once, today. You do not need to memorize it. You just need to know what is in it, so future-you knows where to look.
When the loop feels comfortable, look up "interactive rebase" and "git stash." They are the next two power tools, and with the mental model you now have, both will make sense in minutes.

🧠 If you remember one thing: Congratulations, you now hold the complete mental model: a growing chain of photos, movable bookmarks, two synced copies of the album, and a review ritual. Everything else in git is a footnote to those four ideas.