$ /courses/git/interview
Not a Top-30 with a list of answers. Each question is a card: what they want to hear, the usual traps, a follow-up, and links into the knowledge base for depth. Right now 47 questions across 8 clusters.
Each cluster is an independent topic. Open the one you're weakest on, or go in order.
/internals
7 questionsQuestions about the Git object model: the four object types, SHA as the key, how history sits on disk, and why branches in Git are cheap. This is the foundation for every other cluster. Without it, talking about rebase, reflog, and filter-repo is pointless.
/branching-merging
6 questionsComparing merge and rebase, fast-forward vs no-ff vs squash, when and why you reach for cherry-pick, what interactive rebase does. A standard block for interviews on any role where Git is more than "push to main".
/remote-collab
6 questionsWhat push/pull/fetch do, what a tracking branch is, how origin differs from upstream in fork models, and when a force-push is acceptable. The baseline block for any team whose code travels beyond a single laptop.
/workflow-pr
6 questionsAtomic commits, conventional commits, semver, what separates a good PR from a bad one, how to run code review, CODEOWNERS and branch protection. On Backend and DevOps interviews teams check how well a candidate lives inside a team process, not just inside a local `git push`.
/recovery-archaeology
6 questionsReflog as a time machine, bisect for finding the commit that broke things, blame with its limits, rev-parse as a universal ref resolver, and cat-file for reading objects by hand. This block immediately shows who has "worked through incidents by hand" versus who "read the textbook."
/rewriting-history
5 questionsamend, interactive rebase, git filter-repo, force-push. When it is safe to rewrite history, how to avoid breaking your teammates' copies, and why filter-branch is no longer used. Senior questions: what to do once the rewrite has already happened and the team is suffering.
/security-secrets
5 questionsGPG/SSH signing, secret scanning, ssh keys, gitignore and why it does not fix a secret that already leaked. This block comes up often on DevOps/SRE/Platform interviews, where Git is part of the supply chain.
/troubleshooting
6 questionsScenario questions are the most valuable ones in an interview. Not "what is reflog," but "I wiped my own commits with reset --hard, what do you do first." These questions separate the candidate who read the textbook from the one who put out fires in a team repository. Every scenario here is real.