Real-world Git Scenarios from My Day-to-Day Work

A summary of real-world Git scenarios I encountered during my internship, along with practical solutions and helpful tips for beginners.

Tan Luc

Real-world Git Scenarios from My Day-to-Day Work blog image

🚀 Introduction

During my internship at a tech company, I used Git every day — not just for basic commands, but also for real-world situations that required flexible handling.

This post shares a few specific scenarios I encountered, how I dealt with them, and some handy tips to work with Git more effectively and professionally.

Git Workflow Diagram

🧩 Scenario 1: In the middle of a task, got pulled to fix a hot bug

📝 Description

You're halfway through coding on the branch feature/task-A, when your team lead messages:

"There's a critical bug in an old feature. Please fix it ASAP."

✅ How to handle it

# 1. Temporarily save your current changes
git stash

# 2. Switch to another branch to fix the bug
git checkout feature/task-B

# 3. Fix the bug, commit, and push as usual

# 4. Switch back to your original task
git checkout feature/task-A

# 5. Retrieve your stashed work
git stash pop
💡 Tip:

Always double-check before using stash pop, as it might lead to conflicts if the same files were modified in both branches.

🧩 Scenario 2: Too many small commits in a branch

📝 Description

You made several small commits while working on a task, like:

feat: build UI
fix: padding issue
refactor: split component

Now you want to clean things up before pushing.

✅ How to handle it

# Combine the last 3 commits into one
git rebase -i HEAD~3

Mark the secondary commits as squash or s, and write a clean commit message.

💡 Tip:

Always squash your commits before opening a pull request to keep your Git history tidy!

🧩 Scenario 3: Can't push code — asked to pull first

📝 Description

You commit changes and try to push, but get this error:

error: failed to push some refs
hint: Updates were rejected because the remote contains work that you do

✅ How to handle it

This means the remote branch has new updates that you haven't pulled yet.

# Pull latest changes from remote
git pull --rebase

# Then push your changes
git push
💡 Tip:

Use --rebase to avoid unnecessary merge commits and keep history clean.

✨ Wrap-up

Git isn’t just about running add, commit, and push. It’s a powerful tool for collaborating in teams. When you run into real-world issues, you'll pick up practical skills and understand Git on a deeper level.

Hope these examples help you navigate Git more confidently at work! 💪

Tags

  • git
  • dev
  • workflow