Last time, we talked about empathy and what goes into good pull requests. This time, let’s talk about the other side of the equation: what makes a good code review?

Why are we doing this?

First, it’s important to remember why we’re bothering with pull requests and code reviews in the first place.

They offer us an opportunity to share and explain our work.

They give us a place for feedback.

They demonstrate that we are responsibly managing which code we ship to our users.

They give us a chance to teach (by introducing people to a new part of the code) and learn (by receiving feedback).

Each of those reasons is different, but the same strategies are important for all of them.

This post from the Slack Engineering blog was from February but I wanted to share it now as code reviews are a handy thing to do from time to time. You’d be surprised what you can learn from your code when you have other people review it.