THE GIT COMMANDS I RUN BEFORE READING ANY CODE

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

This post introduces five git commands that can diagnose a codebase before a developer opens a single file. Commit histories can provide a diagnostic picture of a project. They tell you who built it, where the problems cluster, and whether a team is shipping with confidence or tiptoeing around land mines. The commands introduced in the post inform developers what the most changed files are, who the authors were, where bugs cluster, whether a project is accelerating or dying, and how often the development team is firefighting. They let developers know which code to read first and what to look for when they get there.