Recently, I had a conversation with a junior developer on my team. Let’s call him Alan. We were talking about a new notification feature that was going to be used to send reminder e-mails to potentially thousands of people if they had forgotten to enter certain data in the last month or so. Alan was confident that the code he’d written was correct. “I’ve tested it well.”, he said…
It’s so fucking goddamn sad how rare this is. Personally I review changes when I push commits and review all changes personally before publishing the PR and requesting reviews. I’m a senior dev so I guess it’s just something that comes with time (if you care about the code you produce)
I swear to fucking god every PR review I do for younger devs and contractors we have to use (guess what country they’re from), I swear they don’t even look at their own fucking code once they’ve written it, let alone perform any sort of critical analysis. thoughts about any missed use-cases/optimization/future application and evolution? Nah!! That’s what the PR is for right? 🤬
As you said even just a quick once over make a big difference and somehow it’s not even close to common.
Damn I need to quit
This is my typical experience as well, too many people don’t do a code review of their own PR first.
When I was a junior, I had this coworker who did all my reviews. I was doing my absolute best and wanted to show that I was learning, so I would review all my work before submitting it and think, how would he review and respond to this code.
That just stuck with me and it’s my normal practice now.
I eventually learned that’s not as normal as I thought. I also tend to give better code reviews than others.
Edit: the other thing I do is check in with who will be reviewing my code well before I submit anything someone might think is weird and have a discussion about it before the reveiw. If it’s weird, there might be a better way unless were stuck due to technical debt or something, and doing that early vs at the end usually saves time.