Effective Practices for Working with a Code Reviewer

by mtlynch • 6 years ago

14 8 6 years ago

mtlynch4• 6 years ago

Author here. Happy to answer any questions or take any feedback about this post.

I've submitted it to HN with a more to-the-point title, as I thought the community might find the original title too clickbaity.

aberoham• 6 years ago

How do you handle this now as a singleton developer? Do you solicit reviews from private collaborators for parts of your recent work that aren't open-source?

mtlynch4• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading!

Yeah, I still participate in code reviews now that I work for myself. I receive a lot of PRs to open source repos I maintain, and I sometimes hire developers on a contract basis to take on coding tasks that are easy for me to delegate and spec out.

With open source contributions, I try to minimize my expectations of the author valuing my time as a maintainer because they're contributing work for free and a lot of them just aren't aware of how their choices affect the reviewer. But I do plan to link to this post in PR templates so that people can better understand how to contribute more effectively.

aliceryhl• 6 years ago

That doggo's bad manners are exceeded only by its bad manners.

mtlynch4• 6 years ago

Wow, nice catch!

That book is actually where I learned the expression, "Dictated but not read." I'm surprised and amused that other people have the exact same association.

For anyone who's confused, it's from How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie: https://imgur.com/6wzlXxJ

buggy1985• 6 years ago

Hahaha, thank you for this awesome post! Great tips wrapped in a funny tone. What odd times we live in: debugging with rubber ducks, reviewing code with doggo. What comes next? :))

mr_puzzled• 6 years ago

Don't live tweet your HN submission, it's a shitty way to get followers to upvote the submission even if you didn't mean to do that. Next time, save your tweets for 12+ hours after submission and post it on twitter.

mtlynch4• 6 years ago

I tweeted my entire publish-day process,[0] which included re-reading my post, sending an email to my newsletter subscribers, and posting to social media, including HN. I never linked to HN or even suggested that anyone find my post here.

Even if I was subtly vote brigading, ordering me to tweet based on your preferences is not the proper way to handle the situation:

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

[0] https://twitter.com/deliberatecoder/status/13341560121321185...

Effective Practices for Working with a Code Reviewer

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