Code reviews: A success story

But he does back it up with actual facts (as far as we can trust the author to tell the truth) - the feature that the author gave feedback on shipped without any issues. (The article actually doesn't say whether A was fixed-and-bug-free before B shipped, but it certainly sounds like B was less stressful to ship.)

Don't worry, he also asked his own reviewee, who said the reviews were helpful and in no way obnoxious.

Breaking down the size of the change is truly important, otherwise it's easy to miss things and to also disregard them as little details when wanting to avoid blocking the whole change on a "small" thing (which may only seem small because the PR is now huge)

I miss Phabricator from my time at Meta so much, I made this to achieve a Phabricator-like stacked-commit experience via the git cli: https://pypi.org/project/stacksmith/

Former Googler. I also miss Critique/Gerrit. I've tried a bunch of alternatives, and I like CodeApprove:

https://codeapprove.com/

It's great if you have a team that does code reviews. It works less well for reviewing contributions from external contributors on an open-source project,a as the contributor likely just wants to get their PR merged and doesn't want to learn a special reviewing tool.

No affiliation, just a happy customer.

Github's code review tool is uniquely bad. Notably it presents every comment as blocking and requiring sign off - even a "Glad someone cleaned this up! <thumbs up emoji>" needs clearing before merge.

It also has some UX snafus that cause reviewers to write a number of comments and then forget to publish any of them, leading to a lot of interactions along the lines of "I thought you were going to review my PR?" "I already did?"

Shameless plug but since you asked ... CodeApprove (https://codeapprove.com) is probably the closest thing you can get to Critique on GitHub. It doesn't help with the Piper/CitC/Code Search parts though, and I agree those were excellent.

Shameless plug, but we built http://CodePeer.com - to bring Critique like features to everyone else. Take it for a spin if you like!

You would be surprised! I have encountered the attitude that code reviews are a waste of time. It's not common, and I have never seen this attitude "win" across a team/company but it definitely exists. Some engineers are just overconfident, they believe they could fix everything if everyone would just let them code.

Then you are very lucky. I definitely have met those sorts. I’m even aware of teams that collectively push to the main brain under the promise that they’ll probably look at each other’s code later, maybe.

I saw no proof of the later review for all pushes.

Mandatory code review definitely creates red tape. Every place I've been with mandatory code review, I always see people "looking for a stamp".

At my current job, code review requirements are set on a per-folder basis, with many folders not requiring a review. People ask for a review because they want a review (or, sometimes, they dont. For example, I don't ask someone to review every quick one-liner of the systems I am an expert in).

Same.

> Code reviews have a bad rap: they are antagonistic in nature and, sometimes, pure red tape.

I wonder if folks know that this is a job? What are you gonna do, not do it? Cry at night because you forgot for the hundreth time to add token strings to translation files and not be hard-coded? Come on.

Thankfully I'm not working with you