Best Practices and Q&A

Workflow Best Practices

• Pull before starting edits; commit small units often.
• Use branches for features, then merge back on main.
• Review every diff before committing.
• Stash instead of carrying unfinished changes.
• Keep tags only for releases, never daily work.

Interview Q&A

Q: What is the difference between fetch and pull?

A: Fetch downloads remote branch updates without merging. Pull does the same then performs a merge (or rebase) into your current branch.

Q: How do you recover a stashed change?

A: SourceTree keeps stashes in the left panel; right-click and choose Apply (restores without removing) or Pop (restores and drops the stash entry).

Q: How do you combine one commit from another branch?

A: Use Cherry-pick on that commit. It replays the single change onto your current branch without merging the entire branch.

Q: When should you prefer rebase over merge?

A: Rebase keeps shared-branch history linear, which is tidy for review; merge preserves the true timeline, which matters for audit trails.

Key Points

• Fix workflow habits, not just clicks.
• Fetch-vs-pull and rebase-vs-merge are the key concepts.
• Stash and cherry-pick handle the awkward cases.
• Visual review stays a daily habit.