A Git Slip No One Knows About (Until Now) 😶‍🌫️

Let's rewind to a time when I was juggling ten repositories—yes, ten—across multiple products in a high-speed startup environment. I was the sole fullstack developer managing both frontend and backend codebases for five different apps. And as you can imagine, context-switching had become a daily sport. 🌀

Then came GitHub's decision to stop supporting HTTPS for repo access. Everything had to shift to SSH. No big deal, right? Just update some remotes. Easy. Or so I thought.

I started batch updating the remote URLs, repo by repo. But somewhere in that whirlwind, I made the mother of all mistakes: I accidentally swapped the SSH URLs of a frontend and backend repo. That means my backend project was now pointing to the frontend repo, and vice versa. And of course, I didn't realize this before making a move that would haunt me forever: I force pushed. 💥

At first, Git started throwing weird errors. I ignored them—too focused, too confident, too caffeinated. But when the CI/CD pipeline emails started flooding in, I knew something was off. One of them showed React errors in the backend deployment. The other had Node logs showing up in frontend builds. That moment of horror? "Oh no… what have I done?" 😱

Turns out, I had basically overwritten the entire frontend with backend code—and vice versa. The only saving grace? None of it made it to staging. The pipelines failed before deployment, acting like silent guardians.

I immediately rolled up my sleeves, reversed the remote URLs, cleaned up the branches, and force pushed again (carefully this time) to reset things. No one on the team knew. No tickets were raised. It was a clean crime scene. 🧽

But I knew. And I'll never forget that mix of panic, shame, and weird pride. Because that incident taught me something that no book or tutorial ever did: Git is powerful. And unforgiving.

Force push is like a chainsaw. Sometimes you need it. But without careful aim, you'll chop off something vital. I now treat it with the same caution as deleting a production database. Triple check. Pause. Maybe even get a second pair of eyes.

More importantly, that day taught me humility. Even after years of experience, you can slip. You can let speed override caution. But growth doesn't come from perfection—it comes from fixing the mess you create.

Final takeaway: Mistakes happen. Big ones. Own them, learn from them, and if you're lucky, laugh at them. Because one day, they'll become your best stories—and maybe your best advice. 😂🔧