Everyone knows add, commit, push. That's the entry fee, not the game.
The developers who move fast — the ones who never lose work, never ship an ugly history, and never panic when a rebase goes sideways — all quietly share the same toolbox. It's not senior "Git magic." It's about 15 commands you can learn in an afternoon and lean on for the rest of your career.
I teach backend developers over at AS Backend Institute, and if I had to name one skill that predicts seniority without touching a single line of application code, it's Git fluency. So here are the 15 I actually reach for every week — with the gotchas nobody warns you about.
1. git switch and git restore — stop using checkout for everything
For years checkout did two unrelated jobs: switching branches and throwing away file changes. That overloading caused real accidents. Modern Git split it:
