This article was derived from a talk that GitHub Universe faithfully rejects every year. I can't understand why....
For better or worse, git has become one of the Open Source community's more ubiquitous tools. It lets you manage code effectively. It helps engineers who are far apart collaborate with each other. At its heart, it's very simple, which is why the diagram in so many blog posts inevitably looks something like the one shown in Figure 1.
The unfortunate truth that's rarely discussed in detail is that git has a dark side: it makes us feel dumb. I don't care who you are—we all hit a point wherein we shrug, give up and go scrambling for Stack Overflow (motto: "This thread has been closed as Off Topic") to figure out how best to get out of the terrible situations we've caused for ourselves. The only question is how far down the rabbit hole you can get before the madness overtakes you, and you begin raising goats for a living instead.
