From Chaos to Clarity: A Technical Writer's Journey Through Git Cherry-Picking and Team Collaboration
Introduction
Section titled “Introduction”As a Senior Technical Writer, my role extends beyond crafting clear documentation—it involves navigating complex technical challenges to help my team achieve our objectives. Recently, I led an effort to salvage months of work from a stale feature branch, teaching me valuable lessons about git workflows, team collaboration, AI-assisted development, and the resilience required in technical documentation work.
The Challenge
Section titled “The Challenge”Our team had been working on a major documentation revamp for several months. Multiple writers contributed to a shared feature branch, building a comprehensive update to our product’s documentation. However, as weeks turned into months, our feature branch became increasingly disconnected from the main branch—912 commits behind, to be exact.
The branch had contributions from numerous team members, each adding valuable content, but the cumulative drift from main created an untenable situation. When we finally attempted to merge, we faced hundreds of merge conflicts. The traditional merge approach would require untangling conflicts across dozens of files, risking the loss of carefully crafted content or introducing errors that could take days to identify.
We needed a different strategy: cherry-picking.