Ask HN: How to give a crash course on Git?

if you are designing a quick teaching tool or a training session, make warning messages that are informative, motivational, and kinda scary depending on the result (e.g., git commit with message is good, here's a sparkly high five; merge to main w/o code review is scary; squash commits is scary; committing credentials and pushing to prod is scary). Consider designing the lesson around lawful/true/chaotic evil/neutral/good. And then when not great things happen, have them try to fix the issue (rebase, reset commits hard/soft, rollback merge to main, ask for help when you don't know, inform someone else that you've made an error). This way they know informing others that something not great has happened and asking for help are good. Design the lesson such that best practice is standard practice.

Windows novices may not realise that git can be a local program contained in a folder, so making a repo to test how a verb works costs you nothing.

Deeper understanding of git can happen gradually. For now he just needs to be able to do a basic workflow.

    ################################
    # download a new project to local disk
    cd ~/projects
    git clone someUrl

    ################################
    # get latest code
    git pull

    ################################
    # observe the general state of things.
    # Run status liberally, before/after any git operation.
    git status

    ################################
    # commit changes and push them up the the server.
    # This is the bread an butter of your git usage.
    git add .
    git commit
    # good idea to pull in the latest changes before you push up.
    git pull
    git push

    ################################
    # resolve merge conflicts after a pull
    git pull
    # alert merge conflicts! git status will tell you which files conflict.
    git status
    # edit each file with conflicts. Conflicts are flagged in file with ">>>>"
    # replace the ">>>>" sections with the final resolved code.
    # now check them in and push up the the server.
    git add .
    git commit
    git push

    ################################
    # develop in a feature branch
    git checkout -b featureX
    # make changes like nomral. add, commit your changes.
    # if this is a private branch on your local box only, you do not push.
    git add .
    git commit
    # periodically pull in the code from the parent branch so you don't drift apart
    git fetch origin
    git rebase origin/master
    # feature complete. Merge feature back to master.
    git checkout master
    git pull            # get latest master code
    git merge featureX
    git push