Code Quality Q&A and Videos

Hello everyone,

I joined Meta a couple of months ago as an IC5, coming from a predominantly Java background. Recently, I've started working with the PHP codebase, which is somewhat new to me. I've noticed that my diffs tend to undergo several rounds of revisions, which not only delays their integration but also consumes more engineering time than I'd like.

A fellow engineer pointed out that my diffs are often too lengthy, leading to extensive feedback and additional iterations. I'm actively looking for ways to streamline my review process and improve the quality of my submissions.

Here’s what I’m considering to reduce the review cycles and improve my coding approach:

1. Reducing the Size of Diffs
2. Pre-Review Checks: -- Any suggestions here would be great

I would greatly appreciate any advice on:

• Strategies or tools that could help in catching potential issues early.
• Best practices for structuring PHP code and managing larger changes in a PHP environment.
• Any insights on transitioning from Java to PHP, particularly with regard to common pitfalls or key differences I should be aware of.

Thanks in advance for your help! I'm eager to learn from your experiences and improve my contributions to our projects.

Recently, I was helping migrate my team’s entire codebase from a legacy Java DateTime library to the newer, built-in Java DateTime library.

I’ve never performed a migration before, so I don’t have context to know whether this kind of migration is typical (my current team isn’t very good). 

Some of the features of the migration:

• The codebase primarily contains poorly written unit tests or tests without assertions (and no E2E or integration tests)

• Consequently, we tested the application by setting up a separate environment, simulating user flows, and manually verifying results inside the DB

• The migration took over a month to perform - meaning constant merge conflicts from new changes to resolve

What might a migration look like at a good tech company? 

Hi I have been watching on the taro courses.

I wanted ask is there a template that one can follow while writing test plan and how to map it for code reviews ?

Any example that can be shared to understand?

I complained to my skip manager about my colleague's (their manager) code review standards, but ultimately discovered deficiencies in the quality of my own pull requests. As a result, I believe I have lost credibility. How can I regain trust and credibility in this situation?

What are some good books or online resources for learning how to write better code? I am looking for actual code examples demonstrating best practices for someone who already has programming experience but who wants to improve. Examples of topics I am looking to see covered would be whether a function should always include a return, when it makes sense to use try-catch instead of handling bad input with control flow, or when to use different approaches for handling invalid input.

In my company (early stage so there is not a formal code standard, this is also not yet production code it is R&D code) the ML code for preprocessing the data is a long list of function calls, ETL, pandas stuff to manipulate, clean, and process the raw data. Then there's obv a ton of other function calls for ML -- split data, remove missing vals, run it thru ML models and call test methods

This makes it hard to write clean code bc

1. There is very little code reuse to make stuff modular
2. In most SWE cases there are increasing layers of abstraction. But here there is no obvious way to abstract away stuff since most of it is a long list of sequential processing code

Things I'm doing

• Breaking into classes (1 for model, 1 for preprocess, 1 for tests, etc...). But even these are just becoming long functions or a python file with 20 functions
• Trying to make the scripts function based so that when I make a function call it is clear what this function is supposed to do

I'm an entry-level engineer who recently joined a team working in a new domain for me. Despite my best efforts, I find myself making mistakes in my code, such as forgetting edge cases, missing function calls, or mishandling character escaping (to quote a few recent ones). While these errors should ideally be caught during unit or integration testing, our team lacks a formal review process, leaving me solely responsible for testing my code before it gets merged. Consequently, bugs occasionally slip through, requiring post-deployment fixes. Although we're not a customer-facing team, I am afraid this puts a question on my reliability and erodes trust the team can place on me to write good code, that doesn't require iterations of fixes.

Could anyone offer advice on how I can better anticipate scenarios and prevent bugs from being introduced? I'm also unsure whether my challenges stem from a lack of technical skills or effective communication. How can I ensure I'm asking the right questions and considering all relevant factors before writing code?

Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.