Git Flow · Level 1
Foundations
Mission briefing
Mission 1-A: Day one. You've been handed a Slack handle, a Figma invite, and a repo URL. The Tech Lead is online. The codebase is not going to clone itself.
Welcome. Before you touch anything in Figma, grab the repo. Run git clone with the URL I just sent. That pulls the whole codebase to your machine — every file, every branch, the full history.
I open the terminal for the first time and run the command. A wall of text scrolls by. Something worked, I think.
Good. Now — don't work on main. Create a branch off it. Think of main as the published version of a document. Your branch is your personal draft. Changes you make there don't touch the original until someone reviews and approves them.
I create a branch called redesign-tokens. It feels a little like duplicating a Figma page.
Perfect. Now when you make a change — any change, even one line — you save it with a commit. A commit is a named snapshot. Write a short message describing what you changed. Future you will thank current you.
One more thing. HEAD just means 'where you are right now.' It's like a cursor in the codebase. If you ever get disoriented about which branch you're on or what state the code is in — check HEAD.
The Tech Lead asks: "You've made your token changes. What do you do next?"