Name: Quick Tips To Get Higher Quality Code Reviews Faster
Uploaded: 2022-04-14T04:41:52+00:00
Duration: 2 min 14 s
Description: In this segment, we focus on how to ramp up effectively and build trust through proactive code review habits

Quick Tips To Get Higher Quality Code Reviews Faster

In this segment, we focus on how to **ramp up effectively and build trust through proactive code review habits**. By learning from past diffs, referencing previous work, and anticipating reviewer questions, we strengthen both our code and our relationships with teammates.

### Key Takeaways:

- **We study past code reviews to ramp up faster**: Reviewing recent diffs helps us identify codebase hotspots and learn how experienced teammates structure context, write test plans, and address feedback.
- **We reference prior diffs to preempt questions**: When making similar changes, we compare our approach to earlier ones (especially from tech leads) and explain why we took a different route—saving reviewers from needing to ask.
- **We proactively comment on our own code**: By flagging areas we’re unsure about and inviting feedback up front (e.g., naming choices or design alternatives), we guide reviewers toward the most relevant parts and show that we care about quality and collaboration.
- **We show respect for reviewer input**: Code review isn’t just about getting approval—it’s about listening. Ignoring thoughtful feedback undermines trust. We strive to acknowledge and incorporate suggestions to create a positive, team-first review culture.
- **We demonstrate maturity through initiative**: These habits—referencing historical context, asking for help, and valuing reviewer input—aren’t just tactical. They signal leadership and self-awareness, accelerating our growth and reputation on the team.

In this segment, we focus on how to ramp up effectively and build trust through proactive code review habits

[Masterclass] How To Do Amazing Code Review

Code review is one of the most effective ways to learn as a software engineer, especially for those earlier-in-career. Unfortunately, way too many engineering teams get it wrong with slow review speed and low quality comments.

There is a mountain of information in this presentation, so here's our 5 favorite points (in no particular order):
- **Code review is NOT for catching bugs** - Of course, if you find a bug in a PR (pull request), you should call it out, but that's not the primary purpose of code review. The core benefit of code review is to build up engineering culture, propagating best practices amongst the team and growing newer and more junior engineers.
- **Add deep context to your PRs** - Explain what your pull request does and the reasoning behind your approach. Also, *include a test plan.* A test plan is a demo showcasing what your code changes do; try to make it a video/gif, which is especially powerful if you work on front-end (Android/iOS/web). If you can't do a video, try attaching a screenshot or a set of commands to run tests.
- **One diff, one thesis** - Every PR should be focused and atomic: Don't jam the entire new feature you just coded up in a single 1,000+ line PR. Huge commits are hard to review, and your teammates will hate you for it. For the vast majority of cases, you can break down your PRs to 25-250 lines of code.
- **Read others' code reviews** - Similar to so many other things in tech, stand on the shoulders of giants where you can. With code review, this means looking at how senior+ engineers on your team comment on reviews. Try to find patterns in the issues they're finding and incorporate it into how you review code. Revisions that have been rejected with changes requested are a gold mine for this learning.
- **Code review MUST be fast** - When we say fast, we mean that feedback should arrive in <24 hours. What a lot of engineers don't realize is that code review delay is multiplicative: Sometimes commit will need 3-5 revisions before they're able to be merged. If turnaround is 2+ days, this can easily lead to commits taking weeks to land, which is far too slow.

A lot of the terminology in this video is Meta specific. If you're more used to GitHub:
- Diff review = Pull request
- Diff = Commit

Related resources:
- ["How to give better code reviews without full business context?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/vio35mw1SYWM8AYojB2w/how-to-give-better-code-reviews-without-full-business-context/)
- ["How to review code in another language/ from another team?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/B79W3aWc8xMB8cCULFdJ/how-to-review-code-in-another-language-from-another-team/)
- [Presentation Slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1koyIR9K_CtESD7Vnh3GQOE-svFW-ngrQeEAduSAoH0w/edit)