Giving and Receiving Great Feedback through PRs
2023-04-19 , Kuppelsaal

Do you struggle with PRs? Have you ever had to change code even though you disagreed with the change just to land the PR? Have you ever given feedback that would have improved the code only to get into a comment war? We'll discuss how to give and receive feedback to extract maximum value from it and avoid all the communication problems that come with PRs.


Do you struggle with PRs? Have you ever had to change code even though you disagreed with the change just to land the PR? Have you ever given feedback that would have improved the code only to get into a comment war? We'll discuss how to give and receive feedback to extract maximum value from it and avoid all the communication problems that come with PRs. We'll start with some thoughts about what PRs are intended to achieve and then first discuss how to give feedback that will be well received and result in improvements to the code followed by how to extract maximum value from feedback you receive without agreeing to suboptimal changes. Finally, we will look at a checklist for giving and receiving feedback you can use as you go through reviews both as an author and reviewer.


Expected audience expertise: Domain:

Intermediate

Expected audience expertise: Python:

Intermediate

Abstract as a tweet:

Do you struggle with PRs? Have you ever had to change code even though you disagreed with the change? Have you ever given feedback only to get into a comment war? We'll discuss how to give and receive feedback optimally without the communication problems

Public link to supporting material:

https://jdkandersson.com/2022/12/25/giving-and-receiving-great-feedback-through-prs/

I started as a web developer after university with an Australian telco developing websites using Python and JavaScript. After a few years, I switched to product management looking after developer telco products such as an API for sending and receiving SMS where I overhauled the developer portal improving the developer experience. Then I switched back to engineering leadership looking after a team that was creating private and public cloud products where I launched a new private cloud product.

After a few years in the telco industry, I switched to Canonical where I lead a team of developer automating operations using and creating open source tooling.