Weeknotes 6

Nothing particularly noteworthy happened this week. I was feeling under the weather for a couple of days so that wiped out some time, and everything else was pretty uneventful.

I briefly played some Warhammer Dawn of War which of course meant firing up my Windows PC, and enduring all that comes with that. Firstly, the network cable didn’t work for unknown reasons (not strictly Windows' fault ;)). Then, of course, all the things needed updating, which took an age. And finally, just generally using Windows, which remains a shit-show after all these years. I don’t understand all the recent converts back to Windows at all.

Needless to say it didn’t have the relaxing affect I was looking for.

An insightful article on Pull Request reviews caught my eye this week. The author makes some great points about how to perform reviews.

For me, reviews have always been framed as something else that you do for the team in-between doing actual work. As a result I feel like I can’t take as much time for the reviews as maybe I should. Perhaps this is a personal failing, or a team cultural problem, or a mix of both.

I’m definitely going to be giving reviews more time in the future so that I can do things like checking out and running code instead of just suggesting changes directly on the PR. It’s very easy to suggest without testing - pseudo code is fun and easy! - but I’m not sure this is helpful to the original author and, as pointed out in the article, can build resentment.

She mentions that she sometimes pushes commits directly to the reviewee’s branch. I originally thought that I would find that quite jarring - “what does this person think they are doing pushing to my branch?!” - but upon further reflection I have changed my mind. If collaboration is the true aim of reviews then why not?

Zoom APIs made an unwelcome return to my life this week. Third party APIs seem to have this knack for doing most of what you want to do but making anything else incredibly difficult.

The chair is no more.