Hello all. I work on a small team and I’ve been tasked with taking on the bulk of code review for when my senior goes on leave. Although I’ve read a fair bit of code (man am I lucky I learned to code before AI “got good”) I can’t say I’ve done a lot of actual “review”. Does anyone have any tips? I feel responsible if anything breaks after I review it so of course I want to avoid that.
This sounds like a perfect moment to level set expectations with your senior, clear up anything that’s hazy, and establish a set of required steps while performing code reviews.
I should mention I did have a conversation on what he expects for code review, I just like to be over prepared and decided to get more data points. He did give me some helpful input on the tendencies of the people I’ll be code reviewing which I’m sure will be valuable
Formalize everything into policy as code - this normally presents as PR actions. Take time to learn the PR process, but look for where there’s friction that can be collapsed or removed. Once you’re comfortable with testing solutions (linters, compilers, etc.), apply them to only your branches, and bring them to your boss as a tested solution when perfect starts to feel like the enemy of good enough.
It may be worth evaluating whether or not the DevOps path is what you want in your career as well. If it’s an opinion you’ve yet to solidify on, set clear goals with your boss in a few weeks that give you clear wickets to re-evaluate that opinion at over the next several projects or months.