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The Senior Engineer's Guide to Code Reviews

Jayant Bhawal on June 03, 2024

Code reviews. You know how important they are. They are one of the pillars of getting reliable code out there. Yet, it’s one of those ...
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Martin Baun

Thank you for this!
Feedback is a gift. The sole reason is to improve the quality of the code base. The more errors you point out in your code, the better your code will be.

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Jayant Bhawal

Exactly! And it's not limited to errors either. General code quality, abstractions, etc. done well can benefit everyone working on a codebase!

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Martin Baun

Yep :)

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Samad Yar Khan

Great read @jayantbh ! I have learned a lot from Code Reviews and its was solely because of the well structured the comments you left on my PRs followed by the reasoning for changes. The point where people optimise for review time instead of review cycles was bang on as it ends up wasting more time in totality.

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Aditya Mitra

Nice article! Should code reviews be done at the start of the developer's day or at the end?

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Jayant Bhawal

Honestly there's no silver bullet answer to this, and neither should there be.

Someone might like doing this at the start, or at the end. Before, or after lunch. Or at a fixed time every day when they aren't likely to get any meetings.

Someone with more discipline and focus than me might even deal with reviews in between other work, as a break!

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Aravind Putrevu

This one is quite extensive, Jayant.

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Jayant Bhawal

Thank you Aravind! Glad you liked it!

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Ayush Thakur

Super informative article

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Shivam Chhuneja

Quite an insightful piece Jayant!

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Antonio | CEO at Litlyx.com

Amazing, Amazing, Amazing!!! You guys are metrics-driven evangelists like us at Litlyx.

Share some love on our Github Open-Source Repo for Easy Analytics with 1 line of code!

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Jayant Bhawal

That is an awesome project! Glad you liked the post, and thanks for sharing your project

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Lui

Nice Article. It describes a lot of problems I've seen many times with reviews in the past. Middleware looks nice, but for me, it's a bit too expensive. But we don't need to discuss this here as opinions about prices definitely will differ here :D

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X. Ephun

One observation: the further "upstream" you move the difficult decisions, the more effort (time/energy) you will save "downstream". In this case, being judicious when you hire / bring people onto your team will go a long way towards minimizing wasteful PR/MR cycles.

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Jayant Bhawal

I partly agree, because yes, if you optimize for people who can collaborate really well, you'll likely deliver faster.

But despite your best efforts, interviews can be an inherently flawed process. You might find people who are great collaborators, but may not be great at more technical work.

It might be better served by training people and having processes in place that are enforced with care. Because hiring is already very hard. :(

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Mohammed Samgan Khan

thats a really detailed one. Nice work.

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Jayant Bhawal

Glad you liked it!

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Juan Julián Merelo Guervós

But how does aicommit focus on the why? It literally writes the what

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Jayant Bhawal

Oh yeah, definitely don't use AI assistance to do all of your job for you.
Use it as what it is meant to be. Additional help.

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7-Zark-7

My fav application at this moment

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