Git & GitHub in 40 Days: A Free Study Plan for Senior Developers

Senior-level Git work rarely looks like solving a merge conflict or choosing between rebase and merge - by this stage, that judgment is assumed, not something to relearn. What actually defines senior Git responsibility is different in kind: rewriting history safely on a repository dozens of people depend on, deciding whether a growing codebase belongs in a monorepo or stays split across repositories, wiring Git into a CI/CD pipeline so broken code never reaches production, and enforcing standards through hooks instead of hoping every contributor remembers them manually.

This plan is built around those exact responsibilities, condensed into 40 days across five focused phases. If you're wondering how to learn Git and GitHub at a level that actually matches senior expectations, the honest answer is that command fluency stops being the bottleneck - the harder skill is understanding the organizational and technical consequences of decisions that touch an entire team's workflow at once. Each phase here treats Git less like a tool and more like infrastructure: something to design, automate, and maintain deliberately.

By day 40, you'll be equipped to rewrite shared history without breaking a team's workflow, architect a monorepo strategy suited to a real codebase, and build the Git-based automation a production engineering team actually relies on.

This is not a plan for someone still building comfort with rebase or branching strategy - those skills are assumed as a prerequisite, not covered again here. What follows goes further, into territory most developers never formally study because they only encounter it once, under pressure, without preparation. Working through it deliberately, in a low-stakes setting, changes that entirely.

Who Is Ready for Senior-Level Git Responsibility?

This plan is built specifically for developers who already work confidently with rebase, git flow, and team-based PR review, and who are now responsible - or about to be responsible - for decisions that affect an entire repository's structure and process. It assumes genuine middle-level Git fluency as a starting point, since none of that material gets repeated here. The pacing suits engineers currently facing, or anticipating, a real architectural decision: whether to consolidate repositories, how to enforce commit standards across a growing team, or how to safely clean up a repository's history without disrupting everyone using it. If you've been asked where to learn Git and GitHub practices that go beyond individual contributor skills, this plan answers that specifically for the senior layer of responsibility. Here's exactly who benefits most from working through it:

• Tech leads and senior engineers responsible for repository architecture decisions. If you're the person a team turns to when asking whether a project should move to a monorepo, or how to structure a growing set of related repositories, this plan builds the reasoning behind that decision, not just the mechanics of executing it.
• Senior developers setting up or maintaining CI/CD pipelines tied to Git events. Modern deployment pipelines are built on Git triggers - branch pushes, tags, PR merges - and this plan covers designing that integration deliberately rather than copying a pipeline configuration without fully understanding it.
• Engineers introducing or enforcing team-wide standards through git hooks. If commit message formatting, linting, or test requirements currently depend on individual developers remembering to run them, this plan replaces that reliance with enforced automation.
• Anyone who's needed to clean up or rewrite a repository's history and hesitated. History rewriting on a shared repository carries real risk if done without full understanding of its consequences; this plan builds that understanding through deliberate, low-stakes practice before it matters on a real production repository.

How to Learn Git and GitHub

At the senior level, the best way to learn how to use Git is to stop treating commands as isolated tools and start practicing the repository-wide consequences of each decision. If you are deciding how to learn Git and GitHub beyond ordinary branching and pull requests, focus on shared history, repository architecture, automation, and team governance rather than collecting more syntax. Work through destructive or high-risk operations first in disposable repositories, where you can force-push, rewrite history, recover commits, and test automation without affecting anyone else. Then move into system-level exercises such as monorepo migration, Git-triggered CI/CD, hooks, branch protection, and contribution policies, because these are the areas where senior Git judgment is actually tested. The goal is not to complete each phase as quickly as possible but to understand why a workflow is safe, how it fails, and what safeguards a real team needs around it. By repeating these scenarios deliberately, Git becomes infrastructure you can design and maintain rather than a command-line tool you only react to when something breaks.

If you prefer learning without a fixed 40-day schedule, use our Git & GitHub Roadmap instead. It brings the full set of Git and GitHub topics together without tying them to specific dates, so you can move through the material at your own pace, mark completed topics, and track your progress as you learn.

Days 1-8: Rewrite Shared History Without Breaking It

This phase covers the Git operations most developers avoid entirely because the consequences of getting them wrong on a shared repository are genuinely serious. You'll study the mechanics of history rewriting in depth - what actually changes at the commit level, why force-pushing is dangerous by default, and the specific safeguards that make rewriting recoverable rather than catastrophic. This goes past the interactive rebase covered at the middle level into full history surgery: removing sensitive data, restructuring commit ancestry, and recovering from a rewrite gone wrong. By day 8, rewriting history should feel like a controlled, reversible operation rather than a last resort.

History-Rewrite Exercises

• A sensitive-data removal exercise. Commit a fake secret (an API key format, not a real one) to a test repository, then use git filter-repo to remove it entirely from history and confirm it's genuinely gone, not just hidden in the latest commit.
• A recovery-from-disaster simulation. Deliberately perform a destructive rebase or reset that appears to lose several commits, then use git reflog to locate and fully recover them. This builds the confidence that most "lost" work in Git is actually recoverable.
• A force-push safety comparison. Set up a scenario where a plain force-push would silently overwrite a collaborator's unseen commit, then repeat it with --force-with-lease and observe it correctly blocking the operation.
• A written history-rewrite communication protocol. Draft the actual message and checklist you'd send a team before rewriting a shared branch's history, including what collaborators need to do afterward to resync safely.

Safety Rules for History Rewrites

• I recommend practicing every destructive operation in this phase on a disposable clone first, never on a repository you can't afford to lose, no matter how confident you feel in the command.
• I suggest making --force-with-lease your default instead of --force starting immediately, since the safety it provides costs nothing in normal use and prevents a genuinely damaging mistake.
• You should read git reflog output carefully rather than skimming it during a recovery, since the entry you need isn't always the most recent one, especially after several operations in sequence.
• I advise treating history rewriting on any repository with active collaborators as a coordinated event, not a solo decision, even when you have the technical permissions to do it alone.
• I recommend documenting exactly what a rewrite changed and why, immediately afterward, since "why did this commit disappear" is a question a teammate will eventually ask, sometimes months later.

Days 9-17: Design a Monorepo Strategy

This phase addresses one of the most consequential architectural decisions a senior developer influences: whether related projects belong in one repository or several. You'll study the real trade-offs behind monorepo and polyrepo approaches, the tooling that makes monorepos practical at scale, and how to actually migrate an existing set of repositories into one without losing history. This is deliberately less about commands and more about the reasoning senior engineers are expected to bring to a structural decision with long-term consequences.

Monorepo Architecture Exercises

• A monorepo trade-off analysis for a real scenario. Write a structured comparison of monorepo versus polyrepo for a specific hypothetical company (team size, number of projects, deployment needs specified), concluding with a justified recommendation.
• A repository migration with preserved history. Take two or three small existing repositories and merge them into a single monorepo using git subtree, confirming that each project's original commit history remains intact and browsable afterward.
• A monorepo build performance setup. Configure a monorepo tool like Nx or Turborepo on a small multi-package project, and measure the build-time difference between a full rebuild and a cached, selective rebuild after a small change.
• A CODEOWNERS-based ownership structure. Design and implement a CODEOWNERS file for a simulated monorepo with three or four distinct project areas, assigning review responsibility appropriately across them.

Monorepo Decision Principles

• I recommend resisting a monorepo migration purely because it's currently popular - I've found the decision only pays off when the actual coordination costs of separate repositories are already causing real friction.
• I suggest measuring build and clone performance before and after adopting monorepo tooling, since the caching and selective-build benefits only materialize with the right configuration in place.
• You should study how a real, large open-source or public monorepo (several exist with public tooling configs) handles ownership and CI at scale before designing your own from scratch.
• I advise involving the whole affected team in a monorepo decision early, since the migration itself is disruptive enough that buy-in beforehand matters more than technical elegance afterward.
• I recommend starting any monorepo migration with the smallest, lowest-risk set of repositories first, treating it as a pilot before committing your most critical projects to the same structure.

Days 18-26: Connect Git to CI/CD Automation

This phase covers wiring Git directly into a continuous integration and deployment pipeline, so specific Git events - a push, a tag, a merged PR - trigger automated builds, tests, and deployments without manual intervention. You'll study how CI/CD tools read Git events, how to structure branch and tag conventions that a pipeline can rely on predictably, and how to keep pipeline configuration itself version-controlled and reviewable like any other code.

CI/CD Automation Builds

• A working CI pipeline triggered by Git events. Set up a real pipeline (using GitHub Actions or a similar tool) that runs automatically on push and pull request, including linting and a test suite, on a genuine small project.
• A semantic-version tagging and release automation setup. Configure a workflow that builds and publishes a release automatically when a properly formatted version tag is pushed, testing it with several tagged releases.
• A required-status-check merge gate. Configure a repository so pull requests cannot be merged unless the CI pipeline passes, and test the block by deliberately pushing a failing test.
• A Git-triggered rollback workflow. Build a simple deployment pipeline, then design and test a rollback process triggered by reverting the deploying commit, confirming the previous working state is restored correctly.

Pipeline Rules Worth Keeping

• I recommend starting any pipeline with the smallest possible working version - a single lint step, for instance - before layering on tests and deployment, since debugging a failing five-stage pipeline from scratch is far harder than adding stages to one that already works.
• I suggest scoping your Git event triggers precisely from the start, since an overly broad trigger (running full CI on every branch push, for example) wastes resources and slows feedback for the whole team.
• You should version-control your pipeline configuration with the same review standards as application code, since a broken pipeline change can block an entire team's deployments.
• I advise testing a rollback process before you need it in production, not after a real incident, since the worst time to discover a rollback doesn't actually work is during an active outage.
• I recommend documenting your branch and tag conventions explicitly somewhere the whole team can reference, since a pipeline that silently depends on an undocumented naming pattern becomes a recurring source of confusion.

Days 27-33: Enforce Standards with Git Hooks

This phase covers git hooks as the mechanism for enforcing standards automatically rather than relying on every developer remembering to follow them manually. You'll study both client-side hooks (running on a developer's own machine) and server-side enforcement, along with the shared-hooks tooling that makes hooks practical to distribute across an entire team rather than configured individually by each person.

Git Hook Enforcement Projects

• A shared pre-commit hook setup with Husky. Configure a repository so every contributor automatically gets a linting and formatting pre-commit hook after cloning, with no manual setup step required on their part.
• A Conventional Commits enforcement hook. Build a commit-msg hook that rejects any commit message not matching a defined format, then test it against several valid and invalid message examples.
• A bypassable-hook demonstration. Deliberately bypass your own pre-commit hook using --no-verify, then configure a server-side branch protection rule that catches the same issue anyway, proving why the backstop matters.
• An automated changelog generated from commit history. Using consistently formatted commits from the previous project, generate a changelog automatically from commit messages, demonstrating the real payoff of enforced commit standards.

Hook Design Principles

• I recommend building hooks incrementally, testing each one in isolation before combining several into one pre-commit process, since a hook that silently fails is worse than no hook at all.
• I suggest scoping lint and format hooks to staged files specifically, not the entire codebase, since a slow pre-commit hook gets disabled or bypassed by frustrated developers far more often than a fast one.
• You should never rely on client-side hooks alone for anything genuinely critical, since any developer can bypass them intentionally or accidentally - pair every important hook with a server-side equivalent.
• I advise rolling out a new enforced hook with clear communication and a grace period where it warns rather than blocks, since suddenly blocking everyone's commits without warning erodes trust in the tooling itself.
• I recommend reviewing your hook configuration periodically as a team, since standards that made sense a year ago sometimes need updating, and hooks quietly enforcing an outdated convention cause more friction than they prevent.

Days 34-40: Scale Git Workflows Across a Team

The final phase steps back from individual tools into the organizational patterns that keep Git usable once a team grows large enough that informal coordination stops working. You'll study branch protection strategies, code review policies at scale, and how to structure Git-based processes so they scale with team size instead of becoming a bottleneck as more people contribute simultaneously.

Large-Team Git Capstone

• A complete branch protection and review policy. Configure a full branch protection setup on a test repository - required reviews, required checks, restricted direct pushes - and document the reasoning behind each rule.
• A merge queue configuration test. Set up a merge queue on a repository with simulated high PR volume, and observe how it serializes merges safely compared to allowing simultaneous direct merges.
• A written contribution guide for new developers. Draft a complete CONTRIBUTING.md covering branch naming, commit message format, PR expectations, and review process, written for someone joining the team with zero prior context.
• A capstone workflow policy document. Write the full Git workflow policy for a hypothetical 50-person engineering organization, combining monorepo or polyrepo strategy, CI/CD gates, hooks, and review requirements into one coherent system.

Rules for Scaling Team Workflows

• I recommend designing branch protection rules based on actual incidents or near-misses your team has had, not a generic checklist, since rules with a clear rationale get respected far more than arbitrary ones.
• I suggest introducing a merge queue before contribution volume makes manual coordination genuinely painful, since retrofitting process during a crisis is much harder than establishing it proactively.
• You should write your contribution guide assuming zero prior context, then have someone unfamiliar with the project actually test it, since gaps in documentation are far more visible to a genuine newcomer than to you.
• I advise revisiting your entire Git workflow policy roughly twice a year as a team, since a process built for twenty contributors often breaks down silently once a team doubles in size.
• I recommend treating this capstone policy document as a living artifact, not a one-time exercise - the best Git workflows I've seen are the ones a team actually updates as real friction points surface.

Where to Learn Git and GitHub at a Senior Level

Material at the senior level rarely comes from beginner-oriented tutorials, since most of those stop well before history rewriting, monorepo architecture, or pipeline design ever come up. The resources worth prioritizing here are official tool documentation for the specifics - filter-repo, Husky, your CI/CD platform of choice - alongside engineering blog posts from companies that have actually operated large monorepos and high-contribution repositories in production. Conference talks and postmortems from real incidents tend to teach the organizational judgment this phase requires better than any structured course does, since so much of this material is about consequences, not just syntax. I've deliberately kept this list conceptual rather than exhaustive, since the right resource often depends on the specific CI/CD platform or monorepo tooling your team already uses.

Git Responsibilities You Should Be Ready to Own After 40 Days

Forty days of deliberate, phase-based practice at this level builds the kind of Git judgment a team relies on when something structural is at stake, not just individual command fluency. This checklist is meant as an honest measure of that readiness, since senior-level Git responsibility carries real consequences for other people's work when it goes wrong. If any item here still feels uncertain, that's a precise signal for which phase to revisit before taking on that responsibility for a real team. Treat this as a genuine self-check rather than a formality, since the gap between "familiar with the concept" and "trusted to execute it on production" is exactly what this list is meant to surface.

• Rewrite a shared repository's history safely, including recovering from a mistake using the reflog, and communicate that change to a team without disrupting their work.
• Evaluate and justify a monorepo or polyrepo strategy for a real codebase, backed by an understanding of the genuine trade-offs rather than current trends.
• Design and implement a CI/CD pipeline triggered by Git events, including deployment gates and a tested rollback process.
• Build and distribute git hooks across a team, paired with server-side enforcement as a backstop for anything genuinely critical.
• Design a Git workflow policy - branch protection, review requirements, and contribution guidelines - that scales as a team grows rather than breaking down under higher contribution volume.

Git infrastructure at this level supports a team's work, but it doesn't build the product itself - that depends on the languages and tooling layered on top of it. With Git workflow now handled at a senior level, the next gap worth closing is usually on the language side: JavaScript fundamentals for anyone whose Git and workflow skills have outpaced their core language depth, or TypeScript for developers ready to bring the same rigor they've just built around version control into their day-to-day code itself.