Code review can be better • Hacker News Board

Re: Code review can be better

#61

Post by jbmsf » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 4:28 AM UTC

Recently, I've been wondering about the point of code review as a whole.

When I started my career, no one did code review. I'm old.

At some point, my first company grew; we hired new people and started to offshore. Suddenly, you couldn't rely on developers having good judgement... or at least being responsible for fixing their own mess.

Code review was a tool I discovered and made mandatory.

A few years later, everyone converged on GitHub, PRs, and code review. What we were already doing now became the default.

Many, many years layer, I work with a 100% remote team that is mostly experienced and 75% or more of our work is writing code that looks like code we've already written. Most code review is low value. Yes, we do catch issues in review, especially with newer hires, but it's not obviously worth the delay of a review cycle.

Our current policy is to trust the author to opt-in for review. So far, this approach works, but I doubt it will scale.

My point? We have a lot of posts about code review and related tools and not enough about whether to review and how to make reviews useful.

Re: Code review can be better

#62

Post by wenc » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 4:35 AM UTC

Areibman wrote: post #46

The biggest grip I have with Github is the app is painfully slow. And by slow, I mean browser tab might freeze level slow. Shockingly, the best code review tool I've ever used was Azure DevOps.

When I worked at a Microsoft shop, I used Azure DevOps. To be honest, it's actually not bad for .NET stuff. It fits the .NET development life cycle like Visual Studio fits C#.

Re: Code review can be better

#63

Post by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 4:44 AM UTC

> But modifying code under review turned out to be tricky.

GitLab enables this - make the suggestion in-line which the original dev can either accept or decline.

Re: Code review can be better

#64

Post by o11c » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 4:58 AM UTC

irjustin wrote: post #9

MutedEstate45 wrote: post #6

Agree with your pain points. One thing id add is GitHub makes you reapprove every PR after each push. As an OSS contributor it’s exhausting to chase re-approvals for minor tweaks.

mmmm this is up to each repo/maintainer's settings. To be fair you don't know if one line change is going to absolutely compromise a flow. OSS needs to maintain a level of disconnect to be safe vs fast.

Adding fixup commits (specifying the specific commit they will be squashed into), to be squashed by the bot before merge, handles that.

Re: Code review can be better

#65

Post by lmm » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:02 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #53

Areibman wrote: post #46

The biggest grip I have with Github is the app is painfully slow. And by slow, I mean browser tab might freeze level slow. Shockingly, the best code review tool I've ever used was Azure DevOps.

> The biggest grip I have with Github is the app is painfully slow. And by slow, I mean browser tab might freeze level slow. Javascript at scale combined with teams that have to move fast and ship features is a recipe for this. At least it's not Atlassian.

Stash (now BitBucket Server) had the best code review going, head and shoulders above GitHub to the point I thought GitHub would obviously adopt their approach. But I imagine Atlassian has now made it slow and useless like they do with all their products and acquisitions.

Re: Code review can be better

#66

Post by cedws » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:03 AM UTC

koolba wrote: post #14

> When I review code, I like to pull the source branch locally. Then I soft-reset the code to mere base, so that the code looks as if it was written by me. This is eerily similar to how I review large changes that do not have a clear set of commits. The real problem is working with people that don’t realize that if you don’t break work down into small self contained units, everybody else is going to have to do it ind…

Crafting good commits, and good PRs out of those commits is a skill just like how writing good code is. Unfortunately, too many people suck at the former.

Re: Code review can be better

#67

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:11 AM UTC

jbmsf wrote: post #61

Recently, I've been wondering about the point of code review as a whole. When I started my career, no one did code review. I'm old. At some point, my first company grew; we hired new people and started to offshore. Suddenly, you couldn't rely on developers having good judgement... or at least being responsible for fixing their own mess. Code review was a tool I discovered and made mandatory. A few years later, everyo…

[deleted]

Re: Code review can be better

#68

Post by Feeble » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:12 AM UTC

jbmsf wrote: post #61

Recently, I've been wondering about the point of code review as a whole. When I started my career, no one did code review. I'm old. At some point, my first company grew; we hired new people and started to offshore. Suddenly, you couldn't rely on developers having good judgement... or at least being responsible for fixing their own mess. Code review was a tool I discovered and made mandatory. A few years later, everyo…

I am very much in the same position right now. My dev team has introduced mandatory code reviews for every change and I can see their output plummeting. It also seems that most code reviews done are mostly syntax and code format related - noone actually seems to run the code or look at the actual logic if it makes sense.

I think its easy to add processes under the good intention of "making the code more robust and clean", but I never heard anyone discuss what is the cost of this process to the team's efficiency.

Re: Code review can be better

#69

Post by benrutter » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:12 AM UTC

Areibman wrote: post #46

The biggest grip I have with Github is the app is painfully slow. And by slow, I mean browser tab might freeze level slow. Shockingly, the best code review tool I've ever used was Azure DevOps.

What did you like so much about DevOps?

I use it every day and don't have any issues with the review system, but to me it's very similar to github. If anything, I miss being able to suggest changes and have people click a button to integrate them as commits.

Re: Code review can be better

#70

Post by benrutter » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:18 AM UTC

jbmsf wrote: post #61

Recently, I've been wondering about the point of code review as a whole. When I started my career, no one did code review. I'm old. At some point, my first company grew; we hired new people and started to offshore. Suddenly, you couldn't rely on developers having good judgement... or at least being responsible for fixing their own mess. Code review was a tool I discovered and made mandatory. A few years later, everyo…

Interesting take! Personally I'd never throw out code review, for a couple reasons.

1. It's easy to optimise for talented, motivated people in your team. You obviously want this, and it should be the standard, but you also want it to be the case that somebody who doesn't care about their work can't trash the codebase.

2. I find even people just leaving 'lgtm' style reviews for simple things, does a lot to make sure folks keep up with changes. Even if there's nothing caught, you still want to make sure there aren't changes that only one person knows about. That's how you wind up with stuff like, the same utility functions written 10 times.