On Git Refs

On Git Refs Oct 7, 2026 I have recently improved my mental model of Git. Consider these two git commands: $ git fetch origin master $ git switch -c my-feature origin/master Do you understand why is it origin master in one command, and origin/master in the other? I didn’t, until a few weeks ago! My understanding was that git is a content-addressable database. Git stores commits, a commit is identified by the hash of its content, and the content of a commit is, primarily: a memory-less snapshot of a state of the codebase at a given point in time, a list of (hashes of) parent commits. That was enough git for me to understand git log output and get me out of any botched rebase without having to re-clone the repo (For roughly half of my career, I was re-cloning the repo. No shame in that! Learning git is useful, but it’s not the highest priority thing to learn when you start). I now understand that git not only comes with an append-only (“immutable”) content-addressable database, but is…