Code Review @ INN Labs Office Hours

Update: The folks at INN were kind enough to record the session, which is available on their site.

Last weekend, I premiered my Code Review: For Me & You talk at WordCamp Dayton; while I was certainly pressed for time, I feel the talk went rather well. Unfortunately, the WordCamp Central-provided lavaliere mics weren’t working, so I was warned the morning of that while the sessions would still be recorded, the only audio input would be what was picked up by the on-camera microphone (in the back of the room).

On Twitter, Ben Keith — News Application Developer at the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) — asked if there would be a publicly-posted recording, and I had to break the news that if the video makes it to WordPress.tv the audio will likely be subpar.

Is/will there be a publicly-posted recording of this talk?

— Ben Keith (@benlkeith) May 21, 2018

Ben invited me to give the talk at one of their upcoming INN Labs Office Hours, which just so happens to be this week.

On the surface, the idea of code review is a no-brainer: why wouldn’t we want a second set of eyes on our code, especially before deploying to production?

As we peel back the layers, however, we find that the topic of code review is much more nuanced. How detailed should the review be? Who is qualified to perform the review (hint: it’s not just senior developers)? Can we afford to take another developer away from their project to review this one? What steps can we take to ensure reviews are constructive, rather than demoralizing?

Attendees will gain deeper insight into some of the arguments for and against systemic, peer code review, as well as pick up some useful tools to make code review a natural part of their teams’ workflow.

If you’re around at 2pm Eastern this Friday, please feel free to join us for an hour of (free!) code review discussion!