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• Benefits of using emojis in communication, such as adding color to plain text and streamlining review process |
• Discussion on the importance of clearly distinguishing between blocking and non-blocking requests in pull requests |
• Art and skill involved in reviewing and authoring pull requests, including balancing feedback with empathy and time constraints |
• Importance of experience and learning by doing in improving PR review skills |
• Unpopular opinions: dogs are better pets than cats, and aspiring software engineers should take more writing and philosophy courses. |
• The importance of making concise arguments in software engineering |
• Value of non-technical skills (e.g. writing, philosophy) in software development |
• Potential for using tools like GPT-3 to improve communication in software development |
• Natasha's unpopular opinion: the world doesn't need another superhero movie |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Hello, and welcome to Go Time. Today we're going to be talking about PRs. What makes a good PR, how do you do the best PR review, is there such thing as a PR that is too small, too big, too filled with emojis...? We'll be debating all the details and trying to help our fellow Gophers master the... |
Today I'm joined by three wonderful PR pros. First, we have the wonderful Jeff Hernandez, who is an associate software engineer at the New York Time. Hello, Jeff. How are you today? |
**Jeff Hernandez:** Hi. Doing well, thanks for having me back. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Thank you for joining us again. Next up we have Sarah Duncan, who's a staff software engineer at the New York Times. She also teaches an introductory programming course at a high school. Thank you for joining us. I know you're a first-time Go Time guest, so - lovely to have you. |
**Sarah Duncan:** Yeah, thanks for having me. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** And last but certainly not least we have Natasha Dykes, who is a senior software engineer at the New York Times, and happens to be a cycling enthusiast. |
**Natasha Dykes:** Hi. Thanks for having me. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Hi. Thank you for being here. And we have the beautiful, the wonderful, the incomparable Natalie, who is my co-host. Hello! |
**Angelica Hill:** Hi, Angelica! I think it's very smooth you skip pronouncing my last name. I would probably do the same thing. It's so complicated. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** I haven't been on in a whole second, so I'm kind of trying to minimize the amount of babbling and mistakes I get myself into. \[laughter\] |
**Angelica Hill:** Great strategy. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. We'll see if that persists throughout the episode... I might just get over-excited and fumble over my words. But thank you all for joining me today... I'm extremely excited to talk about PRs. |
So we're gonna start with the very basics - what is a PR, and why do we even do them? I'm gonna pass it over to you, Sarah... When you're talking to your wonderful high school students and they go "What is a PR? What is this thing?", how do you explain it to them? |
**Sarah Duncan:** Well, PR stands for pull request, and it is typically used to refer to somebody who's been making changes to a shared codebase, making a request to add those changes back into the common, main - typically it's like a branching situation, so the main branch of that codebase... And that also typically c... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** And why is it useful? Why is this something that we want to be doing? Is that something that maybe -- I don't know, Jeff, do you find PRs useful? |
**Jeff Hernandez:** I mean, coming from, at the Times at least, I'm an associate software level, so I'm kind of like the entry-level... So it's a great way to get feedback from my senior engineers, and basically get a lot of kind of feedback from them in terms of I can be doing better, or code structure, how that could... |
\[08:01\] I feel like it's a great tool, especially for someone that's coming into a new team, kind of getting the lay of the land, getting the norms that you typically might not get in through other forms of documentation. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** For sure. And in terms of assessing PRs, is there such thing as a good PR review? Is there such thing as a bad PR review? I would love to hear how you assess going about either putting in a PR, or reviewing a PR. Maybe Natasha - when you're putting in a PR, how do you decide whether it's time t... |
**Natasha Dykes:** I think for me it's helpful when I review a ticket - usually, it's for a feature or something that I'm working towards... I review it to see if the work that I've done actually meets the requirements, and at that point I can either say "Okay, it's ready to go." I've cleaned up any notes for myself, o... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** And Natalie, I see your intake of breath... Do you have something you'd like to add? |
**Angelica Hill:** Yeah. You asked earlier what is a PR... And it's interesting also to compare PR and CR, and why is it even "pull". So PR, as Sarah said, stands for "pull request." So let's split that into two questions. Why "pull"? Why not "push", why not "merge" or some other thing? And what is the difference, or w... |
**Natasha Dykes:** I think code review is more semantically correct for the work that I'm typically doing... But I think the changes that you could potentially make don't necessarily need to touch code. It could be like a readme update, it could be some other stuff that's kind of supporting the repository versus just t... |
**Jeff Hernandez:** Now, this gets me kind of wanting to go to Wikipedia and learn about where "pull request" came from, and that whole background. That's one of the things I'm interested about, just like where everything came from in terms of software engineering best practices, and naming conventions... Because once ... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So I was super-cheeky and I did google it just now... And it says that the name "pull request" comes from the idea that you're requesting the project to pull changes from your fork. That might not encompass all ways that we now use it in our language, but that's what Google's telling me on the ... |
**Angelica Hill:** Yeah, it is interesting, right? You have this project -- I think most of us use Git in some way; GitHub, GitLab, or... I don't know too many other personal variations, but I'm sure that exists as well. So we all kind of eventually are used to the concept of having a main branch, and then branching yo... |
**Natasha Dykes:** \[12:12\] I've also heard it called a changelog, or CL... So there's a lot of different terms for it. |
**Angelica Hill:** What are you familiar -- what do you know changelog to be? |
**Natasha Dykes:** It's the same thing as like a pull request, but certain companies call it a changelog. |
**Angelica Hill:** So you're submitting a changelog? |
**Natasha Dykes:** Yeah, that's what I've understood it to be. It's just like something I heard in passing. |
**Jeff Hernandez:** Yeah, I've seen that in the Go repository, references to actually the GitHub Go repo, and issues, people referring to changelogs. |
**Natasha Dykes:** Yeah. It's a Google thing. |
**Jeff Hernandez:** It's a Google thing, yeah. I'd totally be interested in learning more about that. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** And that was me thinking that the most basic of questions, "What is a PR?", was just me doing my due diligence for the newbies, but now I see it's a whole debate. There's so many different words to use. This is great, we're opening up a Pandora's box of PR words, and ways to think about code... |
**Angelica Hill:** I mean, software is all about naming things... It starts this early. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Okay. So when you're thinking about a PR, I've heard many people complain about "Oh, this PR is too long", "Oh, this PR is so short. Why didn't you put it in one big PR?" Is there such thing as a too long or a too short PR, too big/too small? Or is it really just down to dealer's choice, whatev... |
**Sarah Duncan:** Yeah, I definitely think that pull requests - or merge requests, or code reviews - can be too long. Sometimes a pull request is too large, and my benchmark for helping set that norm on my team for what is an appropriate-sized pull request is really around how well the pull request can be reviewed. So ... |
So I think it's about thinking about how you can best set up your reviewers to give you a quality, thorough review. I have some thoughts around how to set that norm, but I'd love to hear from others what you think about a length of a PR, and whether a pull request can be too big or too small. |
**Natasha Dykes:** Yeah, I don't think that pull requests can necessarily be too small, because it just takes one character to make a bug... So you're gonna have to make that change... But I do think that -- I agree with you, it could be too long to have a reviewer to actually sit down and understand all the changes, e... |
**Jeff Hernandez:** Yeah, I think it's totally depending on what you're working on at the current moment. So if you're building a new API from the ground up, setting up the handling for the JSON, the payload, maybe that can be a PR. And then the actual business logic can be a separate thing. You're building up as you g... |
\[16:04\] And then you don't ever wanna get in a situation where you have to offer to go step by step with the reviewers... Like, "I've made this change because of this reason", on a call. I feel like that's the worst-case scenario, where you have to actually walk them through it. Sometimes it's necessary, but it's som... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** A walk of shame where you can walk through the glory of your coding... \[laughter\] |
**Jeff Hernandez:** I guess... \[laughs\] |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** I'm just teasing. |
**Jeff Hernandez:** It's all how you think about it, right? |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** "Look at this beautiful PR that I've constructed over many months, that you now have to review with me... Look at this clever naming convention I did. Look at this great function. Don't you love this goroutine?" |
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