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I'm happy this works for them but I find so much value, even in a two person early stage team, of having someone take even the quickest of glances at your code.

I'm happy this works for them but I find so much value, even in a two person early stage team, of having someone take even the quickest of glances at your code. It's a very direct form of communication and also stops a lot of chaos especially when you're moving fast early on. I can get behind a "no nitpicking" policy in some circumstances and always a "be kind" policy, but really someone should be looking over the push if only for their own edification.

chromanoid 5y ago
I totally agree. It's like not copy editing a construction manual for ready-to-assemble furniture.
SpaghettiX 5y ago
The post did not say "don't do code review", it said "do not require code reviews". This is different. However, I do think its nitpicking, because if a code review really doesn't matter, then the approval will come quickly and easily because of how easy it was to review and how little it matters: developers would not spend effort reviewing something that doesn't matter. Or is that a bad assumption I'm making which the post does not.
- azornathogron 5y ago
  > developers would not spend effort reviewing something that doesn't matter. Or is that a bad assumption I'm making which the post does not. I'm in a large organisation that requires review for every change and I've certainly seen review cycles that took effort disproportionate to the level of importance and risk of the change. It doesn't happen every time, but it does happen. Sometimes you can solve it by separately talking to the reviewer and pointing out the low risk or temporary nature of what you're doing, but I've also seen people occasionally getting focused on Enforcing Quality Standards and they can get annoyed if they feel that you're trying to bypass the process.
- jrumbut 5y ago
  I'm making the case against making code reviews optional by relating my experience that there's a significant benefit to someone taking a quick glance when they don't have the time/inclination to do a thorough review. I'm talking about less than a minute in many cases, a sanity check, because eventually someone will slip and commit debugging code that reveals sensitive information, outputs ":wq" in the header of every page, or something else that will be obvious to anyone who isn't the original author. Catching one of these before release is going to be worth doing hundreds of little reviews and a lot of pretty good automated test suites won't catch these kinds of bugs.
sedatk 5y ago
Yes, I think code review is async pair programming.

chromanoid 5y ago

I totally agree. It's like not copy editing a construction manual for ready-to-assemble furniture.

SpaghettiX 5y ago

The post did not say "don't do code review", it said "do not require code reviews". This is different. However, I do think its nitpicking, because if a code review really doesn't matter, then the approval will come quickly and easily because of how easy it was to review and how little it matters: developers would not spend effort reviewing something that doesn't matter. Or is that a bad assumption I'm making which the post does not.

azornathogron 5y ago
> developers would not spend effort reviewing something that doesn't matter. Or is that a bad assumption I'm making which the post does not. I'm in a large organisation that requires review for every change and I've certainly seen review cycles that took effort disproportionate to the level of importance and risk of the change. It doesn't happen every time, but it does happen. Sometimes you can solve it by separately talking to the reviewer and pointing out the low risk or temporary nature of what you're doing, but I've also seen people occasionally getting focused on Enforcing Quality Standards and they can get annoyed if they feel that you're trying to bypass the process.
jrumbut 5y ago
I'm making the case against making code reviews optional by relating my experience that there's a significant benefit to someone taking a quick glance when they don't have the time/inclination to do a thorough review. I'm talking about less than a minute in many cases, a sanity check, because eventually someone will slip and commit debugging code that reveals sensitive information, outputs ":wq" in the header of every page, or something else that will be obvious to anyone who isn't the original author. Catching one of these before release is going to be worth doing hundreds of little reviews and a lot of pretty good automated test suites won't catch these kinds of bugs.

sedatk 5y ago

Yes, I think code review is async pair programming.