Image Transcription: Twitter

Giray Özil, @girayozil

Ask a programmer to review 10 lines of code, he'll find 10 issues. Ask him to do 500 lines and he'll say it looks good.

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LGTM!

That's why PR should be small. It's much better to have multiple PRs than a single big one.

Totally fair to have gigantic PR full of boilerplate code, but generally you can split the boilerplate and your feature in 2 PRs, where only the feature will get a proper review.

All of this obviously depends on the criticality of the system :p

Really grinds my gears to get a review request for a huge PR with almost no context and no instructions on how to run the code / test data.

I've even had one guy ask for a review who hadn't even manually tested his own codes happy path. Sure he wrote some unit tests and those ran but once you actually tried using the code in the app all kinds of exceptions and weird situations came up. No idea how people dare do that shit.

The trick is to give it to another programmer.

True, but the 10 line change can me merged two weeks from now and it won't make any difference. If you let the 500 line merge languish for two days you'll have screwed up the work of three other programmers.

I know this implies that the reviewer didn’t care to read the bigger PR, but I think this might actually be legit. If your PR is only 10 lines long, then chances are those lines are very dense, or intricate in some other way. However, if you submit 500 lines, then it’s probably mostly boilerplate code with trivial adaptions.

No-one in their right mind would submit 500 lines of substantial code.

If a programmer does 500 lines, how much work will they get done before their heart explodes?

All jokes aside, you rather want those 500 remarks even if you only implement 2 of them. That’s the case for atomic commits

This can be called the bike shed effect or Law of Triviality. It's not just programming where a simple digestible idea will be contested because it's easy to poke holes, while something more complicated and more consequential is much harder, so it gets little to no resistance.

Y'all need to get yourselves some PR review automation in place. Stop wasting time on trivial reviews and requesting changes for common problems so that when you ping a colleague for a code review, they know it's important rather than a simple request for a thumbs up.

A couple weeks ago I was tasked to review my own code. It was over 10 lines, so I just passed it.

LGTM ✅