Feedback from a senior dev changed my whole approach to pull requests

A lead developer at my last job in Austin told me my PRs were 'Just a wall of code with no reasoning.' He said I needed to explain *why* I made each change, not just what changed. After that, I started adding 2-3 sentence context notes. The number of review comments I got dropped by about 60% after just two weeks. Anyone else get a piece of feedback that totally changed their workflow?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_amy28d ago

Yeah, the "wall of code with no reasoning" thing hit home for me. I had a senior dev tell me my PRs looked like I was just dumping code and hoping someone else would figure out my thought process. After that I started putting a short blurb at the top like "Refactored this function to handle edge case X better because the old logic was failing silently on Y input" or "Moved the validation logic here because it made more sense with how the data flows through the system." My review turnaround time went from like three days to under a day, and people actually started trusting my changes instead of nitpicking everything. It is wild how such a small habit change can make everyone's job easier.

betty12628d ago

My PRs got way more annoying after I started adding those little notes, now everyone reads my explainer text instead of just looking at the code which slows things way down for me.