Merge upstream branch often

If your branch lives for more than a day or two, I prefer to merge the base branch into it regularly.

This is especially useful before you continue working on an existing branch.

Why?

• conflicts stay small
• test failures show up earlier
• merge conflicts later are smaller and easier to resolve

I usually do this while I am on my feature branch:

# Maybe someone else pushed to your branch. Get these change to your local directory
git pull

# Get changes from base branch. In most cases this is "main".
git merge origin/main

I use origin/main here instead of local main because local main might be outdated. A git fetch updates origin/main, even if you have not switched to main or pulled it recently.