The Theatre of Pull Requests and Code Review
11 hours ago
- #pull requests
- #code review
- #git
- Saša Jurić's talk 'Tell Me a Story' at Goatmire Elixir Conf combined theatrical storytelling with technical advice on code reviews and pull requests.
- Common problems in code reviews include large, complex PRs that are hard to understand and test, leading to superficial 'LGTM' comments.
- Saša advocates for returning difficult-to-understand PRs to the author and focusing on reviewable PRs that take 5-10 minutes to review.
- A reviewable PR should be small in scope, ideally under 300 lines of code, with commits that tell a coherent story.
- Story-telling commit messages help reviewers follow the thought process and understand the context of changes.
- The iterative process of writing and refining commits, including using fixup commits, helps maintain a clean and coherent commit history.
- Keeping every commit compilable and the application runnable is crucial for debugging and using tools like git bisect.
- Focused PRs with clear commit stories lead to better feedback, faster development cycles, and higher-quality code.