Writing code is no longer a solo activity. Instead, reading and working within existing code has become far more important.

So how should we be changing our development process knowing that code is meant to be written once, but be read many times?

At Eventbrite, code review has become one of our most productive habits for building better things together. Making sure we write and modify code in a way that others—and our future selves!—can read well requires a new mindset and some deliberate choices.

We don’t work alone anymore.

Plenty of us crave time alone to solve a problem from beginning to end, but we’re not doing ourselves any favors with that approach. Ultimately, shutting out input from a healthy variety of stakeholders is the fastest way to end up with a faulty, less robust solution.

If we want to write and maintain code that’s readable for lots of other people, we need to work with lots of other people.

Iterating through a rapid feedback loop with others before jumping straight into the code is often the best way of arriving at a strong solution—even more so when the code has been written by someone else and we’re modifying it.

Only a broad and deep understanding of the relevant context allows us to ultimately build an elegant solution that benefits anyone affected by it.

Continue reading “Code Review: The art of writing code for others”