In a previous job I was asked to integrate work from another team. Due to the complexity of the system, it boiled down to reading a diff of every changed file, then copy-pasting the lines of code over as needed.

At the time I was also crowned our team’s ‘Git Guru’ since I understood it the best out of our entire team. Meaning I knew the difference between fetch and pull. I didn’t keep the information to myself and explained a lot of git concepts at length with team members. But I also spent a lot of time back seat driving, at their request, to make sure they made a new branch correctly.

Looking at the completion date of the previous team’s work, it was less than 6 months old. Our project’s release cycle was measured in quarters, and we hadn’t had a release in over 9 months. Comparing the changed files, the delta was simple and less than ~100 LoC.

Using git I checked out the branch for each feature, merged it into my own testing branch of the next release candidate, then validated that the builds and tests passed.

I did the same thing for the remaining branches and finished a task that was estimated to be 2 months in 2 week. Even then, most of the time was spent on the build process (around 2 hours) and setting up the tests (the builds had to be walked over via hard drive to our testing environment).

I caught up with a former team member after I left and they said our team lead didn’t believe I did all the work that fast by myself. The experience showed me that by having more than a working knowledge of your tools can make mundane tasks disappear almost entirely.