Code Review for Me & You @ WordCamp Dayton 2018

While the camp didn’t come together last year, I’ve spoken at the last three WordCamp Dayton conferences and am happy to be returning this year! I’ll be giving a new talk, Code Review: For Me & You, at WordCamp Dayton 2018!

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.

This is a topic I’m really interested in, and have been itching to put a talk together on the topic since seeing Andy Melichar give his code review talk last year at WordCamp Cincinnati. I’ve been a huge proponent of code reviews since my days at 10up, and regularly advocate for it in some of my other talks.