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by jlund-molfese 1331 days ago
My team posts their PR reviews in our team slack channel. Which bothers the totally async purist in me, but we’ve found it to be a good middle ground between waiting for reviews requested via GitHub email and actually pinging someone.

If something’s super complex, and I don’t feel like it’s the submitter’s fault, or even if I’ve got a PR where I realize the code I’ve written isn’t optimal, and async feedback would be too slow, I’ll usually schedule a meeting on someone’s calendar, giving them at least a day of notice.

But otherwise? If I can’t understand what’s going on without too much difficulty, that’s on the PR submitter to improve their code readability through structuring, naming, comments, or as a last resort, external documentation imo. So I see not having the original submitter involved as a feature. Who knows if they’ll be around when you have questions about the same code in 2 years? Is someone going to document everything that was said in the “over the shoulder” review?

That being said, the work I do isn’t anything cutting-edge. More complex code justifies more involved review practices.

1 comments

> My team posts their PR reviews in our team slack channel. Which bothers the totally async purist in me, but we’ve found it to be a good middle ground between waiting for reviews requested via GitHub email and actually pinging someone.

Why don’t you install the GitHub Slack application? It will tell you immediately when somebody asks for a review and it has other useful functionality as well.

Oh, I guess some additional context is that by convention we use Slack emoji to indicate whether we approve, comment or request changes. Then again when it’s merged/deployed. Reviews aren’t specifically requested of individuals, usually just the entire team. That way, if it’s a channel everyone is in, other people can see at a glance whether they should still review the PR.
The github slack integration would post a message in a slack channel and then your team can use emojis to react to it just like you do.
Will have to check that out then, thanks!