When Git Becomes a Learning Curve

A Designer’s Journey into Developer Workflows

I’ve been pushing myself to get more comfortable with development workflows… specifically Git, terminal commands, and our codebase at work. As a designer who’s spent years avoiding IDEs because of the inevitable friction that makes me shut down and retreat to familiar tools, this feels like both progress and a test of patience.

The Fear is Real

Here’s what I told a coworker recently:

“This is terrifying to me as someone that’s not technical, that’s trying to get comfortable and familiar.”

And I meant it. I’ve attempted to use IDEs for the past decade, and every time, some friction point makes me regress back to what I know.

Building the Muscle Memory

So a coworker walked me through the process step by step. Here’s what I learned (and subsequently documented obsessively in my notes):

Creating and Saving to a Branch

# Create a new branch
git checkout -b branch-name

# Save your work
git add .
git commit -m "your commit message"
git push origin branch-name

Working on Existing Branches

# Check out existing branch
git checkout branch-name

# Only pull if others are working on your branch
git pull

The key insight my coworker gave me: be specific with your Git commands. While git push works for subsequent pushes, they always use git push origin branch-name to avoid accidentally pushing to the wrong branch. It’s more typing, but it’s protection against future headaches.

The Little Wins

Despite the frustrations, I made real progress:

1. Practiced the commit-push workflow multiple times

2. Learned about git status to check what’s changed

3. Understood the difference between branches and PRs

4. Got more comfortable navigating terminal history with the up arrow

My coworker’s encouragement helped:

“You’re doing great. This is not trivial stuff. This is really the guts of it.”

What I’m Taking Away

For other designers dipping into development:

• Document everything. I have a notes file that’s nearly word-for-word of every command I need

• Having someone walk you through the process is invaluable

Still Learning, Still Pushing

My coworker said something recently that resonated:

“I feel like I’m constantly relearning Git because I find it so incredibly unintuitive. It’s like the most engineered engineering thing out there.”

That helped. Even engineers find this stuff unintuitive.

I know I’ll have a million questions tomorrow once I forget everything I learned today. But my notes are there. The muscle memory is building. And next time something breaks, I’ll have a better foundation to understand why.

Progress isn’t always linear, especially when you’re learning tools built by and for a completely different discipline. But it’s still progress.