We decided that everyone in the team is allowed to approve changes. If no one has reviewed your change within 24 hours you are allowed to approve it yourself. It will usually come up in the daily sync that a self approval is imminent, which usually leads to someone taking a look.
Self-approval leads to a road of sadness. For example, a theoretical company needs to self-renew an ssl cert. No problem, the cert will be stored with the rest of the secrets and retrieved in a secure way on deployment. Unfortunately if you don’t store the cert key in a secure way, the deployment still works fine and you don’t need to figure out the “onerous” encryption process.
So you push the private key to the company git repo, and then deploy the cert! Done and Done.
which usually leads to someone taking a look
Nevermind the idea that one reviewer is somehow sufficient, this sounds like pure fantasy. Did you forget a “/s”?
Who said anything about only requiring 1 reviewer? And no, I did not drop an /s. You should try working for a healthy team where everyone takes collective responsibility and where the teams progress is more important than any one person’s progress.
uggg. Another multi thousand line PR. Again.
I’ll leave it to tomorrow.
Tomorrow: fuck this. Ive got shit to do.
As a required reviewer on a lot of things, I envy that bear so, so much.
Ughh I’m currently waiting on a review and I’ve pinged people multiple times but nothing. It’s blocking all my work for the rest of the week.
Be sure to call out in standup
Me: “So, I completed this time critical task a week ago, had it QA tested, and it’s been awaiting approval since Tuesday. I’ve posted my PR with links in the dev chat, I’ve pinged each of you individually each day as well. It is still awaiting approval before I can merge and pick up a new card from our backlog that is dependent on these changes. If literally anyone has the bandwidth to do this review, please do. I’ll post the link here again as well, to make this super convenient for you all, as well as the Jira card for reference, and the changes and requirements themselves are extremely straight forward. It should only take 5-10 minutes, tops. And I will be sitting here useless until it is done. Somebody, please, for the love of god…”
My team: crickets
Scrum Master: “Thanks for the update, kryptonianCodeMonkey… next up is…”
Well on the flip side, I somehow ended up doing legacy projects with a dude that has been coding for decades and is still actively developing in VB and asp.net. Weirdly, the guys not dumb - he asked me for an API and I blew his mind with generics and cut the code down by a third. I then introduced him to the concept of (primitive) components, he isn’t quite sold on the importance of code reuse, but every time I delete 1k lines of old code and replace it with a 20 line function my soul grows
When we do code reviews, it’s basically pair programming sharing screen… Usually we just push everything and wait for bug reports, because this crazy ass company has been using a reference book, a calculator, and hundreds of people were manually re-entering things by memory into QuickBooks until January 1st this year. They were thousands of dollars off in the second week… We thought it was a bug. It was all user errors
He’s been working on this system for 15 years, I ran into a table with 126 columns the other day. Somehow, this dude manages to swim through a database with hundreds of tables and just as many triggers with rawdog sql.
It’s fucking wild…I split my time between that and working on my virtual assistant that brainstorms it’s own development with me, and an app that I’m trying to make into a unified fediverse client.
I know what a tight ship looks like and I push for best practices when I think there’s something to gain worth the fight, but the sheer spectrum of software dev is incredible. My legacy guy told me about what’s been taking all his time lately today - he has to build a system to screen scrape from an emulated IBM mainframe… And I spent my morning working on a unified activity pub interface and my evening testing my weird observation that LLMs speaking UwU seem to perform significantly better
My point being, there’s a sweet spot between methodology/process, and it’s very rare to hit it. And also, software dev is playing in realms beyond human comprehension, and no matter how orderly if seems it should be, every senior dev who still writes code is superstitious, and often correct to be so
Notify the people you have to notify for your blockers, then embrace the absurdity
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk
You get paid hourly? If so sounds like you shouldn’t say anything and get paid to do nothing
I’m salary, but my boss loves nothing more than firing people.
I mean you’ve done your job and even reminded them everyday that they need to do theirs for you to do yours. Take screenshots and if they try to sack you, straight to court/your fair work ombudsman
I live in a place with at will employment, so they can fire me whenever they want.
I get paid double my last job, but it’s like Netflix, a lot of people get fired from Netflix.
don’t review just blind accept and merge it’s more fun that way
LGTM
As a senior at my last big company job, basically all I did was conduct meetings and do PRs. It’s such a grind.
My opinion now is that most PR is worthless anyway. Most people give, at best, a superficial skim for typos, lack of comments, or other low-hanging replies (that usually, really, a static checker or linter should be dealing with).
Reading the code base in little chunks like that doesn’t give you proper context for the changes you’re reading. Automated unit and integration tests would be better for catching issues like that, but of course then who is reviewing and verifying the tests? Who’s writing them for that matter?
Ideally, pair-programming or having extra people on projects to create knowledge redundancy would help. But companies want to replace juniors with AI now, so that’s not looking good. Senior devs and architects might know the major pieces of much of the code, but can they “load it into working memory” sufficiently to do a quality PR that will catch something the tests didn’t and QA wouldn’t? Not in my experience.
I think the best actually-implementable solution for most teams is to get rid of PR expectations and take a multi-pronged approach to replacing that process.
- use tooling to check for and fix basic stuff. Use a linter, adopt a code standard, get a code formatting tool that forced adherence to the standard and run it on every PR.
- Unit tests if you got them, start if you don’t. You don’t need 90% code coverage, just make sure critical paths are covered.
- Turn one of your useless meetings into a code review session. Each week/sprint, one Very Important Code section is presented by the developer that works on it most or that last changed it. This helps the whole team learn the code base, gets more eyes on the important stuff regularly, and enforces not just a consistent style but a consistent approach to solving and documenting problems.
- PR (and the github PR approval stuff or its equivalent for you) should be streamlined but preserved. Do have a second person approve changes before merging, just to double check that tests have finished and passed and all that. If your team is so busy that no one ever approves PRs then allow self-approval and be done with it. This will make regular code review very important for security and stability, since any dev could be misbehaving unseen, but these are the trade-offs you make when burning out your team is more important than quality.
This comment seems like a lot of work to read, I’ll pretend I didn’t see it
So you’ll just hit approve?
