March 17, 2018

Episode 101: Style In Code Reviews and How To Thank My Manager

30 minutes

Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

A fellow developer submitted a pull request for me to review. The logic was totally fine, but the spacing drove me nuts. We use a linter to enforce some coding style but because this wasn’t a rule in the linter, I wasn’t sure if it was fair game to call him out on it. Was I being petty? I knew if this got into our code I would end up fixing it later myself. I told him I would approve the PR but thought that spacing should be more readable and consistent with the rest of the codebase. What is the proper etiquette here? Mention it and add the rules to the linter later? Don’t care about spacing if the code gets the job done?

How do you express gratitude to your immediate supervisor? My immediate boss, who is lead engineer for our team, does an amazing job. Occasionally I get to peek into his world and see how much work he does. I am amazed at all he does for the team; shielding us from company politics, keeping us updated on relevant info, dealing really well with team drama and even makes time to contribute to code. How do I show gratitude besides building meaningful software?

I recently read a paper on coding style and how it survives even through compilation and optimization!

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