git rebase onto remote updates

Question

I work with a small team that uses git for source code management. Recently, we have been doing topic branches to keep track of features then merging them into master local

Answer 1

You can also just rebase against the up-to-date master

git checkout topic_1
git rebase refs/remotes/origin/master

Which obviates the need for the pull (at least until the EOL of your feature branch). Our process uses GitHub pull requests so I never need to do that locally.