The impact of file position on code review

One thing my colleagues and I do is expressly offer up a starting point when reviewing changes: "the meat of the change is in xxx.go; the rest is ancillary/supporting". This allows the reader to contextualize themselves more quickly in the change, and understand the rest of the changes with greater ease.

You could take an adversarial view of it: maybe it's better if people get dropped into the changes so they're left to workout if the changes in each file stand alone rather, decontextualized from their original change.

Similar, if you're going up against a promotion committee, or parole board in jail, you want to go when the judges have been recently fed.

IMO file/folder structure in a project is a geographic mapping exercise. It's not that far off from city planning. I think it's so important to design the structure and naming conventions of a project with the ultimate goal of aesthetically-pleasing, human-understandable spatial organization of digital artifacts. You "go here" to "see that". This "lives here". You travel to the destination of the thing you're looking for, and gain a deeper understanding of how the world is constructed that you are inhabiting.

This is one of my pet peeves with any kind of cloud file storage -- oftentimes they try to reinvent or abstract away the idea of a deeply-nested filesystem tree, and it just feels anti-human to me lol

Edit: I hit submit and then acknowledged I was kind of ranting about something else entirely from the paper itself!

People review files top down?

I can't imagine doing that. I glance at the list, and try to spot the highest level change (schema changes, interfaces, etc) and start there. If the core idea is wrong no point wasting time on the rest.

Then I go up from there to implementation details and tests. Often jumping between modules or functions, coming back to some things later when I have more context.

This is kind of a weird aside, but I attended many of my kids' music lessons. The teacher would ask them to play a selection, and then stop them after the first few measures, to work on some point of technique or interpretation. It meant that they never got to the end of anything, until the recital.

"Measure position" had a strong impact on review.

I realized that perfecting the entire selection isn't the point. Instead, the point is for the student to learn how to critique themselves, and improve their practicing.