There’s a human on the other side of your code review

Code reviews are a fact of life for most software developers; are we doing enough to look beyond the code within them?

“Don’t take review comments personally, it’s just a busy engineer’s way of communicating.”

I remember reading that line littered amongst some advice for junior developers. I didn’t think much of it at the time — makes sense, I thought.

As I went about code reviewing and being code reviewed at my day job, that line kept coming back to me. Easy enough advice to follow. But, I started thinking, why is that the status quo?

There’s a lot out there that’s already been said and written about code reviews. “It’s not just about bugs, but about more than one person understanding the code,” “here’s how to minimize time spent on reviews,” “young developers learn faster when asked to do reviews,” and much more. I want to explore another aspect of code reviews, the often ignored one: what are we doing (or failing to do) in code reviews that is facilitating camaraderie, trust, learning, and innovation?

Rest of post moved to https://tadasant.com/blog/theres-a-human-on-the-other-side-of-your-code-review