I absolutely love, and recommend to any new team members, GitX [0] and other similar Git visualizers. It's incredibly valuable to be able to instantly see the Merkle Tree drawn out and say "oh, the reason my current HEAD isn't picking up thing X that I thought I'd merged in, is because thing X isn't visually an ancestor of my HEAD even though temporally it might have happened earlier than my most recent commit."
I see newer engineers struggling to memorize "what Git command corresponds to my current situation" all the time, and they're missing the intuition that it's all a very simple graph under the hood. Github, I think, does a disservice by trying to present commits as a linear list - while certainly it's easier to code a linear visualization, it makes people feel like Git is impenetrable magic, when it's anything but.
(Full disclosure: my love of visualizations of commit graphs may very much be influenced by the game Fringer [1], which was a formative part of my childhood!)
[0] https://rowanj.github.io/gitx/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAV7IioO_t8
I see newer engineers struggling to memorize "what Git command corresponds to my current situation" all the time, and they're missing the intuition that it's all a very simple graph under the hood. Github, I think, does a disservice by trying to present commits as a linear list - while certainly it's easier to code a linear visualization, it makes people feel like Git is impenetrable magic, when it's anything but.
(Full disclosure: my love of visualizations of commit graphs may very much be influenced by the game Fringer [1], which was a formative part of my childhood!)
[0] https://rowanj.github.io/gitx/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAV7IioO_t8