.md

Unproductive code reviews

Arguments over style

Problems:

• People feel demotivated
• Lower productivity
• Team doesn't grow

Solutions:

• Decide what the convention will be (everyone votes, then it can't be brought up again for 3 months)
• Lint EVERYTHING
• Pre-commit linting with lint-staged, yorkie (fork of husky)
• Run related unit tests on pre-commit (--findRelated with Jest)
• Always find some room for improvement, even if it doesn't prevent the code from being merged.

Team not aware of conventions, or just not following them

Problems:

• Someone not sure about the steps involved, e.g. to add a page
• Not writing tests, when they know they should
• Not following other conventions that can't be caught by a linter

Solutions:

• Use generators with Hygen
• Workspace snippets in VS Code
• Internal docs (have new people read through your internal docs and ask questions, before getting a walkthrough)
• In-line comments (but first, see if you could re-write the code in a way that doesn't require a comment)
• Use Cypress for end-to-end tests (much friendlier dev experience)

People get hurt

Problems:

• A new dev asked me once after a week of my code reviews, "Do you hate me?" because I always found areas for improvement. Now, that's not a problem - that's what helps the team grow.

Solutions:

• Use a lot of emoji - it's better to come across as weird than mean
• Ask questions, rather than assuming fault
• Let nitpicks go if they won't ever result in a bug, difficult to figure out, difficult to maintain, very likely to require a major refactor very soon