Code Review Q&A and Videos

About Code Review

Code review is one of the most common and powerful ways for software engineers to learn. On top of increasing code quality, it builds engineering culture within a team.

How to get commits merged in faster when changing other teams' codebases?

Mid-Level Software Engineer [4] at Uber

My work will often times span across multiple services within Uber, which means that I need to write code in codebases outside of my team's. Sometimes when I do this, it takes a long time for my commit to land as there's many rounds of follow-up questions, leading to a lot of rebases, revisions, and time spent on my end. I understand that they're trying to be the best stewards of their codebase, but this can be a bit frustrating sometimes. How can I make this process smoother and land these kinds of changes more quickly?

80 Views

1 Comment

Variance in pull requests across levels of seniority?

Senior Software Engineer at Grab

How do pull requests and pull request comments look like with an increasing level of seniority?
Are pull requests for senior engineers not expected to have any comments for improvements? If yes, then what kind of comments should be there?
Also, have seen some principal engineers not sharing their pull requests as they are quite high in seniority and merging it directly. Do you recommend that? If not, who should review PRs for very senior engineers if the team does not have engineers at that level?

207 Views

2 Comments

[Part 5] Meta Intern Success Series - Writing The Code

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8:20

[Part 5] Meta Intern Success Series - Writing The Code

400 Views

6 Likes

I made an eng task with 2 different options, but the engineer submitted a draft PR with a completely different approach.

Anonymous User at Taro Community

Since the engineer implementing the task went in a different direction from what I had in mind, now I feel like I have to dive into the code and explain the approaches I wrote, and also get involved in the code much more than I would like. How can I overcome this?

86 Views

1 Comment

How do you suggest code review feedback where you think there’s a better way to do what they’re currently doing?

Software Engineer at Seed Stage Startup

Since our company is so small (< 10 engineers), we do code reviews across platforms – so I review iOS and web code even though I’m an Android engineer.

I haven’t gotten any negative feedback on my code review yet, but I want to make sure I’m doing it properly. How can I suggest improvements on other engineer’s code, even if they’re on a different platform, or if they’re more senior than me?

88 Views

2 Comments

[Masterclass] How To Do Amazing Code Review

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1:31:49

Learn About Code Review

Code review is a fundamental part of software engineering. It is a process where engineers review each other’s code to improve its quality and receive feedback. Code review gives your teammates the ability to look at your code closely and catch potential mistakes and bugs early on. This can help stop small issues from turning into larger issues later on. Code review also increases awareness of what teams are working on, encourages cross-pollination between teams, and facilitates discussions about coding standards.

Code review allows you to share knowledge with your team about industry and team best practices. You can uplevel each others’ skills by offering feedback on how to make each others’ code better. You can ensure consistency of code by ensuring contributions to the code base follow the same patterns. When the codebase follows the same patterns, it’s easier to understand, maintain, and grow a project.

There are clear guidelines you can follow to improve your code review process. You should set clear goals for code review by specifying what you want to achieve, usually maintaining high code quality, sharing knowledge, and making sure everyone uses consistent coding patterns. This will set the stage for a focused code review. Give feedback that will improve your teammates’ coding ability instead of just pointing out problems. You should always provide suggestions on how to fix the problems. You can make the code review process smoother by using tools that automatically check for common issues, like code style. These automated tools can catch problems that can be missed in a manual review.

There are some common mistakes and traps that people follow into during code review. You don’t want to focus too much on the nitpicky code style. You should have a discussion once about code style, then you should automate it away which will lead to consistent enforcement of the rule and save your team time so they don’t need to constantly look for code style mistakes.

Pay attention how you give feedback because code reviews involve people. You should be positive and considerate when reviewing other people’s code. Recognize the effort put into the code and create an atmosphere where everyone feels encouraged to work together.

As the code author, you should develop a sense of empathy for the person that is reviewing your code. This means making the review process as smooth as possible for them and being grateful for the time they spend reviewing your code. This can mean adding context in your pull requests and including before and after screenshots.

Remember that code review can have many benefits in software engineering. It helps to keep code quality high, encourages teamwork, and it makes sure that everyone follows the same patterns. Software engineers can use code review to boost the overall success of their development efforts.