Today I led an intermediate Git workshop at Hacker School, with occasional help from more experienced Git users. We covered:

• cherry-picking versus merging a commit from one branch to another
• git blame [filename] to see who last touched a line
• git log --full-diff -p [filename] to view full diffs, and a few cool things to put in your .gitconfig to better view your log, e.g., aliasing something to log --oneline --graph --all --decorate -30
• better search with git grep, and file listing with git ls-files, to only look at the files in your repository (thus ignoring files mentioned in your .gitignore)
• git add -p to make your commits cleaner and improve your pull requests (with thanks to this blog post by Allison Kaptur)
• git rebase -i to rewrite history in your branches and thus also improve your pull requests
• shallow cloning with git clone --depth 1 (demonstrating that it is faster and takes less disk space, but this took a few tries, since Git is so efficient at storing past revisions that the effect barely registers for small, young repositories)
• git reset and the differences among default, --soft, and --hard
• ways to talk about history and what git rev-parse does under the hood (and thus HEAD~1 and HEAD^2 and parents and ancestors and whatnot)

Only afterwards did I see this super useful explanation of the Git model which articulates what's actually doing what.

As we were discussing rebase, I said I didn't yet feel smart enough to do non-interactive rebases. My peer Connor frowned at that. I sought a replacement word. Skilled? Experienced? Audacious? Confident? Maybe that last one.

I'm also going to play around with the gitk GUI tool, maybe with tig, and git bisect. And I heard a brilliant suggestion: when you're about to do something in Git that feels scary, in terms of rebasing or resetting or whatnot, clone your repo and try out your idea on the clone!