Update: My code went sideways at a hackathon near Denver last weekend
I was at this 24-hour hackathon in Denver last Saturday, trying to push a simple feature to GitHub, and suddenly the entire repo crashed because I forgot to check my branch merge settings. Nobody warned me that beginners like me could mess up a shared project so fast just by hitting the wrong command. Has anyone else had a similar disaster at a coding event, and how do you avoid this kind of panic mid-project?
Man, that sounds rough! A crashed repo at a hackathon is a nightmare, especially when you're running on no sleep. I had a similar thing happen at a meetup where I accidentally force pushed to the main branch instead of my own fork. The whole team's work just vanished for a few minutes until someone with admin rights rolled it back. What saved me later was setting up a simple rule with the team to always do a pull request and never push directly to main. Also, using a tool like Git Kraken or even just the command line with a dry run option can help you double check before you hit enter. Keep backups of your local work if you can, just in case the remote goes sideways.
Force pushed to main instead of your own fork" oh man that hits close to home. I did the exact same thing at a Denver hackathon last year. Now I just set the main branch as protected in the repo settings before we even start coding, and I always do a "git status" like five times before pushing anything.