Probably unpopular opinion, but peer reviews are overrated. If coders are good AND know the project, the only thing you can do in a PR is nitpicking. They are more useful for open source collaborators because you want to double-check their code fits with the current architecture. But people here are reacting as if peer reviews could actually spot bugs that tests can’t catch. That happens rarely unless the contributor is junion/not good.
Peer reviews can catch bugs that tests can’t catch.
I won’t disagree that peer reviews are overrated, but they’re a great way to train and onboard less experienced devs (who are just more fun to work with, anyway). Like I’m a platform dev, so I don’t have a “home” project - if I had to know every project before I opened a PR for it, I’d get hardly any work done. Review help other knowledge experts weigh in on my changes.
I operate from the presumption that code’s first job is to be as easy for a human to understand as possible. It should clearly communicate what it’s attempting to do. If your code isn’t written so that your colleagues, or you 2 years from now, can read it and understand it, it’s bad even if it’s whip tight, fits all the AC and has 100% test coverage with a perfect mutation score. That’s what I focus on when I review code: does it communicate intent semantically. Code that can be understood is code that can be reused, optimized, altered when use cases change, generalized out into even more reusable code, and provide insights that technically perfect but incomprehensible code can’t. I, like you, assume that the coder knows what they were trying to do and how to test for it, so that only gets a cursory glance to spot common errors like missed nullables, inverted conditionals and shit like that. I look at it from the perspective of “If I had to add functionality to this, could I do so easily”. Because I’m gonna one of these days.
Nitpicking can be automated by a linter, then reviews can actually sit back and review more important things like high-level design and scalability
as if peer reviews could actually spot bugs that tests can’t catch
There can’t be bugs if there are no tests to catch them! Ofc you can also automate test coverage standards. But PRs are sometimes the only way to catch bugs, even and especially with senior devs in my experience bc they are lazy and will skip writing tests, or write useless or bare minimum tests just to check off code standards and merge on ahead
Code review can’t fix incompence though. I lost count of how many times my boss told me “review that PR well because X is not very good”. Also my point is that they are overrated, not that they are useless.
That’s not actual code though, it looks like some kind of trace. Notice the filenames at the end of each line.
The actual solution the issue opener there might be looking for is to disable C++ parsing, since it’s not actually C++ code, it’s just some text they pasted into VSCode and they’re wondering why their editor can’t handle it.
Without thinking about it much, my understanding was that each line of the stack trace referred to a real line, even though the block as a whole wasn’t a program.
But! because of this comment I went and checked the lines of those stack traces. And in fact, they’re not real lines, just the C++ type expansion.
That said I’ve got a another half as bad example that is real so Ive edited the comment to point to that example instead.
Am not sure I disagree but I don’t agree completely. It’s insane to merge things that go to production without testing. However at the same time I don’t like continuous integration one bit. Open source mantra is great in my opinion. Release early, release often. If code chews some important data, have a test version of it that needs to run some time before it gets pushed to production.
Delaying merge of someone’s code means branches get further and further apart. At the same time code in main branch gets fixed and tested the most. I would merge often but only full features. None of the half-done stuff. Let humans test it a bit before it reaches target audience. That is usually good enough to catch most bugs. Those that do happen to leak into production are easily fixed since you have fast development cycle and deployment pipeline. And backup frequently.
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