ReactFoo 2019

Code review is the duty of every developer in a team. We are the guards of the mystical “good” code and defenders against evil technical debt. It’s universally agreed that it’s easy to spot “bad” code and much harder to determine “good” code. I’m going to share some of my experiences working on a team producing a large amount of code every day, with few reviewers. We’ll dive into looking for smart architectural and design decisions, coherently understanding what problem the author intended to solve and understanding how they implemented a solution.

I’ll touch on automating away the most common issues within Code Review and pulling the technical brains out of your team mates into great documentation. Most importantly we’ll talk about the human side of code review and how to manage code review within large and small teams. Code review helps our teams grow institutional knowledge and shared understanding of the systems we build together. A strong understanding of how to review code will help you to write better code and help you help your teammates to write better code.

Outline

Code Review Culture (Managing Code Review)

I’ll introduce a process for managing code review and the different types of code review that I’ve found to be useful Architectural Reviews, Security Reviews. I’ll also introduce some tools to help with standarding your codebase and making reducing styleistic differences between reviewers.

Elements of Strong Code Review

In this section we will jump into the main elements of code review and what reviewers should be looking for.

• Docs
• Architecture
• Tests
• Security
• Performance
• Bugs

Understanding Code

In this section we will jump into the examples of good code review and poor code review diagnose what is happening in each example.

Speaker bio

Matthew is a Software Engineer at Stile Education. He’s recently finished a Computer Science degree at Monash University. While he’s not writing code he’s drinking filter coffee.