Git rebasing - explain like I'm an idiot

Published: June 01, 2025

When discussing git strategies so many people advocate for rebasing. I’ve never actually understood how it works and what it does. This is my note to my future self.

Rebasing means; update feature-branch with the commits to main that happened after the branching, effectively changing the starting point of the feature-branch with respect to main.

This is of course not all that rebase can do but it’s enough for me right now. Considering that my previous usage of rebase has been to squash commits (CI, CI, CI …), this is a skill-up for me!