I commit often, push to branches until I'm satisfied, and for smaller branches often do squash-merges so all of the mess doesn't show up in the history. Also,

I commit often, push to branches until I'm satisfied, and for smaller branches often do squash-merges so all of the mess doesn't show up in the history. Also, I too used "foo" and "bar" as variable names, but stopped doing that. If I find myself using nonsense names it means that my mental model of the problem (or the solution) is too vague. Then I stop and think about it instead of going ahead at full speed.