Git is a powerful tool, but few people take advantage of all its capabilities, and much of its functionality can feel like an inscrutable black box.

In this hands-on workshop, we’ll work through various Git commands and talk about more advanced workflow practices, including merge options, searching through commits, and rewriting repository history. We’ll talk about the contents of the .git folder, the data structures constructed from those files, and the abstractions Git applies on top of those data structures. We’ll utilize visualizations to watch what happens in the repository when you perform certain Git operations, with the goal of unraveling those abstractions and demystifying what Git’s actually doing under the hood. Finally, we’ll explore a variety of tools at your disposal that you can use when you get stuck; learn how to get back to a known good state and find lost commits with ease.