Get Tons of Emails for Code Reviews
I'm a Data Engineer at Instacart. Every day, I get a lot of emails relating to PRs that are up for review or have been reviewed and are being merged. I'd estimate ~30, but prob as high as 50 some days.
The emails can come from my anyone on my team (~10 other people) or department (probably ~30 other people).
My strategy for dealing with these until now has been to only look at and review code that comes from 4 other individuals. These 4 people are the ones who I work most closely with. I asked my manager about doing code reviews for anyone else and he said to just stick to the core 4 other people I work with (including him), which makes sense given that I have plenty of work to do and those 4 other people produce a fair number of code reviews to do.
My question is, is there any value in me receiving emails for all those other people in my department who's code I don't care about (at least for now)? Should I try and either unsubscribe from or auto-archive their emails so I don't have to delete/archive those emails every time I access my inbox?
Just wondering what people's strategies are for this.
Thanks!
Discussion
(6 comments)- 1
3 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroYou definitely don't need to read all those code review emails for people whose code you aren't reviewing. I recommend customizing your notifications so it only comes from those 4 people.
At Meta, I made all the code review notification emails go into a folder (i.e. skips the core inbox), which I never read. I would just go to Phabricator directly (Meta uses Phabricator instead of GitHub) to see what I needed to review. The tool would bubble all the code reviews I was marked as a reviewer on to the top, and I would just go through that queue as aggressively as I could (I love reviewing code to unblock folks).
- 13 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
- Filter out emails that are not immediately actionable or relevant
- Add alerts so you get notified of changes in particular files or classes that you care about (I'm pretty sure Github and Phabricator have functionality for this)
- Schedule dedicated time to review PRs.
- 03 months agoMid-Level Data Engineer [OP]Instacart
thanks Rahul! any recommendations for when to schedule time to review PRs?
- 03 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
Default is to have code reviews at beginning and end of day to preserve your focus.
- 13 months agoEng @ Taro
My question is, is there any value in me receiving emails for all those other people in my department who's code I don't care about (at least for now)? Should I try and either unsubscribe from or auto-archive their emails so I don't have to delete/archive those emails every time I access my inbox?
They'll ping you if they really want you to look at their review. I don't think there will be much value if you look at every incoming PR. But, if there is some core code that other people are touching, it might be worth it to add yourself or your team as a blocker for those changes.
- 13 months agoMid-Level Data Engineer [OP]Instacart
thanks Charlie! Ya, we have CODEOWNERS set by code location, so you already need someone from every group related to files you touch in a PR
