Recently Yanina Bellini Saibene reminded usto update our Slack profile: After doing that I went on to updating my profile photos on the rOpenSciwebsite, which ended up teaching me a few git tricks I would like to share here.Thanks Maëlle Salmon for the encouragement, andSteffi LaZerte for reviewing this post.

Did you know that GitHub lets you refer to the default branch of any repository by substituting the branch name with HEAD in the url? This is a very useful trick to write robust code that works regardless of whether the default branch is called main or master, and will keep working when the default branch gets renamed at some point.

We have been working hard behind the scenes on the upcoming release of our new git package named gert, a joint effort from rOpenSci and the Tidyverse team. One of the main features of gert is the out-of-the-box authentication mechanism, which is provided via the new credentials package.

Are you new to version control and always running into trouble with Git?Or are you a seasoned user, haunted by the traumas of learning Git and reliving them whilst trying to teach it to others?Yeah, us too. Git is a version control tool designed for software development, and it is extraordinarily powerful.