See all this is fine for someone with good experience in git. They know how to solve the screw up. But wih junior devs, who don't know much about it, they will just get confused and stuck. And one of the senior has to involve and help them solve. This is just annoying because these can be avoided very easily. Until they understand the pattern of how everyone operates with git, it just creates issues.

To me first time causing this issue is completely fine. I will personally sit with them and explain then what went wrong and how to recover. Most of them will repeat it again, act clueless and talk like they are seeing this for the first time in their life. That is the difficult part to me.

May be I'm just old school, and a grumpy old person, even though I'm not that aged.

Same… My usual strategy: rebase, if conflict abort and merge, if no conflict continue; merge always with explicit commits to master / main (no fucking squashing); keep task references in branch names and commit messages.

Continuing on a squash merged branch is very annoying, and I had to deal with this in one repo regularly... Luckily I was annoyed enough to research about this and found out about rebase --onto "main merge commit" "branch merged commit".

So this workflow is needed if you are working on a public, i.e. multiple devs collaborating on a single branch, scenario. But it is much better to avoid this as much as possible. Usually it is a 'scoping' issue, where you create a branch that is too broad. For example 'api-for-frontend', which is a massive thing.

But let us say you absolutely have to get multiple devs on same branch, then this workflow is totally fine. There is nothing wrong in it.

In our org we prefer to delete the branch after merge. In a way it says 'this branch is closed'. This is to encourage devs to define smaller and more logically scoped branches.

I want to take this opportunity to say that, branch is just a label on a commit, with some additional functions. Once you start focus on commits and lineage of the commits, then branches become some what irrelevant.

Is it ok to continue on a branch if you also merge back main into it?

On some repositories, sure.

But better maintained repositories don't allow merge commits (because merge commits suck), and so will have squashed (or rebased) on merge.

(If squashed) The squash will have changed commit IDs, so a long running branch rebased won't benefit from a clean shared commit history.

So it can work, but "you're gonna have a bad time."

In general, git works best if branches are thrown away as soon and as often as possible.

(Edit: Good clarification in response below, added here for consistency and accuracy.)

The problem is not when I have to rebase. I know how to handle it. But with juniors they approach us only when things are in a really bad situation, where they cluelessly applied some commands they found on internet or from an LLM. Then it is very annoying to sit down and untangle the mess they created.

And regarding the pushing without fetching, it is usually a different branch. So they won't incorporate the new changes in the main branch into their working branch, but just push their work into a branch. Again not a big deal. Just annoying.

Having to resolve the same conflict multiple times suggests excess noise in your git history. You might want to pay closer attention to creating a useful git history. It’ll help with any future archaeology, and it’ll also help rebasing go smoothly.

I do this sometimes but then I forget about it and then node_modules in each repo fills my SSD.

This might have been what it was as you mentioned git reflog. I don’t remember clearly since I’m usually pretty good at not making this mistake.