Overcoming the stress surrounding Code Review, for the betterment of your project and career.

By Mike Zornek

Elevator Pitch

Having others judge your work can be extremely intimidating but it’s also one of the fastest ways to mature as a creator. Today we’ll go deep on what Code Review is, how it works and how your project and team (even if solo) will benefit. We’ll close with more tips, including avoiding toxic behavior.

Description

Code Review is a practice where before a change is made to a code base, the code is first posted somewhere for peer review and critique. Code Review is an extremely productive way to catch problems before they are delivered to users as well as help individuals mature as programmers.

In this talk we’ll explore Code Review by documenting the responsibilities of those involved, the person posting the code, the person (or people) reviewing the code, and then again back to the poster, as they react to the feedback given. In addition to the raw process of these stages we’ll also review the very human side of Code Review using real world stories, the good, the bad and the ugly. We’ll close with more general tips and tools that can help, as well as cover some of the how and why you might want to utilize these practices even in your own solo work.

The best audience for this talk are people who are looking to improve their personal or team code processes. Those who attend will leave with very actionable strategies to execute productive code review on their own projects.

Notes

Having spent much of the last five years working at a mix of startups and agencies I’ve had the opportunity to see a variety of project processes come and go. Code Review however remains a solid practice that seems to survive. Even process-adverse coders usually come around to respecting its value. I’ve done a first draft of this talk at my local CocoaHeads and it went over very well. I’d love to give it some more polish and present it at 360iDev. I think it’s full of great takeaways for people looking to improve their team’s process or those individuals starting a new team.