Lost your README?

#git #push #github #origin

When `git push` Breaks Your Flow: A Cautionary Tale of Lost Mojo (And How to Get It Back)

We've all been there. You're coding away, everything’s flowing smoothly, and you've just squashed a bug or added a feature that makes you feel invincible. You’ve done your git add ., dropped a poetic commit message, and now you're ready to share your work with the world. The final move: git push -u origin master.

But wait.

Red text.

Push rejected.

Suddenly, your momentum is gone.

For a second, you're staring at your terminal wondering if Git just betrayed you. You retrace your steps. Was it a rebased commit? A remote mismatch? Something about history diverging?

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me — and it probably won’t be the last. But each time, it chips away at that coding mojo we work so hard to maintain. It's a moment of panic, a slice of self-doubt, and a brief identity crisis all rolled into one.

My Mistake

In my case, I wanted to get my latest changes up to GitHub. Simple enough. So I ran:

git push -u origin master

And boom — rejection. Some upstream mismatch. I felt deflated.

So what did I do?

I panicked.

git push -f origin master

Yes, I forced the push. Yes, I knew the risks. But sometimes in the heat of the moment, logic takes a back seat and your fingers go rogue.

Did it work?

Technically, yes. The push went through. But when I opened GitHub, it was like I’d stepped through a time warp. README files and changes from previous commits had vanished — overwritten like an embarrassing childhood diary.

Finding Redemption in Stack Overflow

After a few deep sighs (and possibly a snack to comfort my inner developer), I hit the forums. I landed on this golden post which outlines the safer, cleaner steps to take when your push is rejected.

Here’s what it suggested:

git fetch origin master
git pull origin master
git add .
git commit -m "Your new commit message"
git push origin master

And just like that, my local and remote were finally friends again. No force, no loss of files, and no broken history. The key? Don’t push through the problem — pull and merge into it instead.

The Moral of the Story

The CLI can feel like a sword sometimes. Wield it well, and you feel powerful. Misuse it, and you're cleaning up history with a teaspoon. But moments like this are valuable. They teach us humility, patience, and the importance of taking a breath before smashing that -f flag into existence.