You just joined a new team. Someone hands you a repo URL and says, "Get familiar with the codebase." What do you do?
Most developers start reading files from the top. They open src/, scroll through directories, and try to build a mental map folder by folder. That approach works—eventually—but it's slow, directionless, and leaves you guessing about the stuff that actually matters: where the problems live, who knows what, and whether the project is healthy or held together with duct tape.
Git has already been recording everything. Every bug fix, every refactor, every 3 AM hotfix—it's all sitting in the commit history, waiting to be read. You just need to know which questions to ask.
These five git commands take under two minutes to run and will tell you more about a codebase than a full day of browsing files.