I do not claim to be smart at all, but I've worked with very smart people and they have taught me about git and how it works at a fundamental level, so I feel at this point qualified to offer some of the stuff I've learned as best practices. So her'goes.
When you pull, you sometimes don't know what you're pulling. It can be helpful to use git fetch --all and compare what's on your remotes with git diff origin/master to see what's different.
more to come…