Giving Back Through Code Review

Every June, Google celebrates GoogleServe—a month-long campaign to encourage Googlers to volunteer in their communities. This year, PullRequest worked with the Google.org team to sign up 50 Googlers across 14 offices to provide code review to nonprofit projects, like the Wikimedia Commons Android app and Techtonica’s tech training curriculum for women and non-binary adults.

Code Reviewer Spotlight: Eli Perelman

A passion for contributing to open source projects is one of the most common traits we see in PullRequest code reviewers. Eli Perelman has dedicated his programming career to helping other developers through open source. Now, as a PullRequest code reviewer, Eli applies his commitment to improving the experience of other developers to reviewing code for other teams.

This Code Reviewer Spotlight is part of an ongoing series of interviews where we ask our top reviewers the following seven questions so you can get to know them. Below, discover how Eli sees being a reviewer as another a way to improve the experiences of other developers.

The $85 Billion Cost of Bad Code

A recent study from Stripe and Harris Poll found the average developer spends 42% of their time dealing with technical debt and maintenance issues, of which 3.8 hours are spent just on debugging “bad code,” or poor quality code that’s difficult to maintain. The opportunity cost of bad code comes to $85 billion annually — resources that could otherwise be used to build better software.

Code Reviewer Spotlight: James Slater

PullRequest reviewer James Slater learned Google’s code review process by doing. Over several months of demonstrating his understanding of the style guide, code clarity, language mastery and best practices, he was finally granted JavaScript Readability at Google — an internal certification that shows you understand Google’s best practices and coding style for a given language.

Completing the demanding readability process showed James’ commitment to improving code quality and mentoring others, and it also highlighted what he liked and disliked about the code review process. Over his engineering career, he found the right balance of positive, constructive guidance, and now provides code review as a service with PullRequest.

Why Truly Great Product Managers Love Code Review

Many years ago, I started my career in product management with only a basic understanding of what is code review—developers looking through each others’ code for bugs.