I’ve been reviewing code for the last ten years. My GitHub chart is about 32% of code review and 29% of pull requests. Does this lead to a question: How many pull requests I created or reviewed?
I was querying GitHub to get some metrics about this, and the result is excellent. I reviewed or created about 6500 pull requests as a software engineer.
I believe that code review — and code review feedback is one of the most critical soft skills for a software engineer. Provide useful feedback, ask questions properly, be polite, show respect, and understand what others think about this piece of software — In other words, understanding how your teammate thinks, is probably the most required skill nowadays.
First things first
When I submit a pull request, I usually do the best thing that I could do with my knowledge, resources, and context. But sometimes it is not so good as I think it was.
It isn’t easy to understand other peoples’ information, and sometimes the code or the review is not self-explainable. I have a phrase that solves 90% of my questions:
What would be helpful?
And almost the answer is a piece or working (or schema) well explained about what is, in fact, helpful.
From reviewer perspective
If I don’t understand a piece of code that I am reading, probably my question would be
Nice. I think that could be done in a different direction:
Do you that it would be helpful?
From a reviewee perspective
There is a current discussion, and I don’t understand the reviewer’s perspective.
Thanks for your review. It is not clear to me what I should do. What would be helpful?
And you, magically, receive a direction, schema, code, or whatever you are asking.
Discover new phrases
Or build yours.
What do you think that works in this case?
Would it be worthwhile if ….?
Would be useful if ….?
What do you think would be beneficial in this case?
Would it be better if I implement it in this way?