Benj Edwards wants to put the “personal” back in “personal computer”, the answer.ai folks took Devin for a month-long spin, Asaf Zamir explains why senior engineers can remain ICs and still have a fulfilling career, Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti rethinks documentation by putting user actions first & Tero Piirainen lays out his case for Nue, the standards first web framework.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Will McGugan is a full-stack developer and Python expert who is offering up free reviews for any/all qualifying open source projects.What a great idea/service to the community!

The reviews will focus on API design and general architection of your project with a view to making them a) more maintainable b) future proof and c) user friendly, but will avoid anything that a linter could do for you. Reviews are intended to be constructive and hopefully give advice you can act on, but are in no way a “grade”.

I won’t need to run your code to do a review and reviews aren’t intended to fix bugs.

All reviews will be public and will be published in the repo in a markdown file. An exception would be for any security issues, where I would notify you first.

Not everyone all at once, now. There’s already quite a few requests in the queue.

This post is a confession of an “egocentric maniac” (his words) and how damaging code review can be:

This review I kicked off the article with? I didn’t send it. Instead I gave the guy a couple of comments and politely asked to fix a couple of things. No big deal if the code’s not good, I can fix it myself it I need to. But I can’t fix the psyche of a guy broken by dozens of harsh reviews.

My personality today isn’t my disease. It’s a disease of the whole industry, at least in Russia. Our mentality is predicated on the cult of power and superiority. And that’s what we need to fix: just stop being that. It’s quite easy, actually.

Stefan Buck:

In this post I share my learnings of doing code reviews for 10 years. I have received positive feedback from my peers in the blog post and since code review is becoming more and more the standard of development I think sharing my learnings here will may help someone.

Number 10 introduced a new term for me. The “gangsta merge”?! 🤣

Adam and Jerod talk with Katrina Owen about Exercism.io - an open source platform for crowd-sourced code reviews on daily practice problems. Practice problems are available in Ruby, Elixir, JavaScript, Python, Haskell, and Clojure, and other languages are in the pipeline.

Lots of good advice in this quick post on Thoughtbot’s blog. I especially like this:

It’s easy to list all the things you think need changing in the pull-request but gloss over all the good things present. If you see something good, say something good! It’s refreshing to receive positive feedback. I find that even simple things like these can go a long way:

• “I love this method extraction”
• “These tests look great! 🎉”
• “Nice catch on this poorly named method! Thanks for changing it”

Adam and Wynn caught up with Adam Moore and Satyen Desai from the YUI team to talk about YUI 3, Node.js, and working with Douglas Crockford.

Go Time producer, Jerod Santo, ranks & reviews the most (un)popular opinions of 2023.

The last time we did a roundup of our unpopular opinion polls, it was November of 2021!
That’s too long ago, so today we fix that bug. Join Go Time producer, Jerod Santo, as he ranks & reviews the most (un)popular opinions of 2022.

Søren Fuglede Jørgensen builds a font thats also an LLM, Hugo Landau writes about the demise of the mildly dynamic website, SQL Studio is the simplest little database explorer ever, Mathew Duggan reviews GitHub Copilot Workspace & Stephan Schmidt lays out the case against mocking + what to do instead.

Bahaa Zidan says your web framework doesn’t matter, DHH writes about magic machines, Dylan Huang reviews thousands of opinions on HTMX, Tim Ottinger says programming is thinking & Tim Spann says small language models (SLM) for the win.

Chip Huyen documents the shifting sand of large data models, Herman Õunapuu reviews the Zimaboard, Bryan Braun shares 4 of his most recent VSCode configuration discoveries & Swizec Teller wrote a great summary of the inaugural AI Engineer Summit.

Alex Schepanovski:

I always thought of 1+N as a thing that you just keep in your head, catch on code reviews or via performance regressions. This worked well for a long time, however, the less control we have over our SQL queries the more likely it will sneak through those guards…

I tumbled on a couple of 1+Ns while reading a project code for an unrelated reason and it got me thinking – do I ever want Django to do that lazy loading stuff? And the answer was never.

Turns out the implementation of this is quite easy. ~15 loc for the naive version and ~35 for a more robust version. Give it a try if you, like Alex, never want to allow a 1+N in your Django app again.

Long past are the days when I’d upgrade my production OS on day/week one, but I do try to read at least one or two reviews of the latest macOS to see how much of my FOMO is well-placed. And if you’re going to read just one review, it might as well be Ars Technica’s…

I haven’t waded into the depth of this review yet, but the opener has me underwhelmed:

The throughline for all these features is about making the Mac more welcoming and comfortable for people who come to it through one of Apple’s mobile platforms…

But when was the last time that the Finder, the Dock, or the Menu Bar was given a substantial, non-cosmetic rethink? When did Apple last make major improvements to the way that windows coexist on a given screen? The Mac does get new under-the-hood features that are specific to it, but the headline features are mostly iOS and iPadOS imports, especially this year.

I would absolutely love for Apple to rethink Finder! Having said that, the fact that this reviewer is down with Stage Manager on macOS despite how terrible I’ve heard it is on iOS is intriguing…

Stage Manager differs from standard macOS multitasking by offering a column of recently used apps on the side of your screen (it’s the left-hand side by default, but it will switch if you’ve got your Dock set to use the left-hand side of your screen instead). But unlike minimizing or maximizing an app from the Dock, each “stage” can contain multiple app windows from multiple apps; switch from one stage to another, and every window on that stage will pop back up on your screen in exactly the arrangement you were using before.

It’s off by default, thank goodness, but I would like to give this a try and see how it maps to my way of window/app management. Have you tried Stage Manager on macOS? What do you think? How does it compare to iOS?

Zach Musgrave from Dolt reviews several case studies of performance problems they ran into while benchmarking Dolt DB to get row access to be as fast as MySQL.

Oh, and he also shares how to fix each problem, which is nice. 😉

We revisit our Harmonai story from last week, Jamie Tanna reviews posting his salary history publicly, Sid Sijbrandij’s new (open core) venture fund, Zed Shaw thinks Stripe is like Paypal in 2010 & Helix is a new Rust-based terminal.

This is a solid primer on git rebase and the many ways it’s useful.

In Git, a rebase is a very versatile and useful tool to rework commits. Use it to achieve a workflow with high-quality changes proposed in high-quality commits and merge requests. It makes your developers and reviewers more efficient. Code reviews and debugging also become easier and more effective.

Point Refurb at your Python code to see how bad good it is. Here’s the author’s motivation:

I love doing code reviews: I like taking something and making it better, faster, more elegant, and so on. Lots of static analysis tools already exist, but none of them seem to be focused on making code more elegant, more readable, or more modern. That is where Refurb comes in.

Emma Catlin writing for Pinterest Engineering:

… at some point in my first year, I realized something critical: I needed to help the entire team, not just myself, in order to grow to the next engineering level. To start, one of my teammates recommended I review code.

The advice was simple enough — use code reviews as a way to learn more about a piece of code and expand my knowledge of our overall system. It turned out code reviews were the perfect way for me to continue my learning journey.

She got better at it over time (of course) and shares some of those learnings in this excellent post.

In this post, Tomas Wróbel lays out 10 potential drawbacks to the typical PR flows:

1. More long living branches, more merge conflicts
2. The reviewability of a change decreases with size
3. Short feedback loop makes programming fun
4. Reviews tend to be superficial
5. Merging is blocked by remarks that shouldn’t be blocking
6. It’s easier to fix than to explain the fix
7. Developers are slower to adapt the responsibility mindset
8. PRs discourage continuous refactoring
9. Negative emotions and outright pathology
10. How do you switch to branches with migrations

In my professional work, a few years ago, I worked on a project where the objective was to make reviews of films and trailers, working through APIs that brought everything together.

The problem is that the subtitles were not always synchronized with the audio and it was very difficult (if not impossible) to find a player that could adjust in real time (at least without wierd plugins and hacks).

A few days ago I started working on a project called “moovie.js”, which is basically a standard HTML5 video, that allows you to adjust the offset manually in real time and has full support for .vtt and .srt caption files.

Eric Normand (long-time FP advocate and author of Grokking Simplicity) joins Jerod and KBall for a deep conversation about Functional Programming in JavaScript. Eric teaches us what FP is all about, details the functional side of JS, and reviews the good/bad/ugly of React.

Oh, and join us in the #jsparty channel of our community slack where we’re giving away three FREE e-book copies of Eric’s new book! 🎁

If you’re intrigued by the overwhelmingly positive reviews of Apple’s M1-based machines, but not sure if your favorite (or necessary apps) have made the transition, this site has your back.

(Hat tip to Christian Witts in our #applenerds channel for linking this up)

Code review is critical to being a software engineer yet there aren’t many resources on how to build up the skill. That’s why Shubheksha wrote what she learned when she first started making the mental shift from writing code to reviewing it.

Remember to be kind and empathetic — Code reviews are very ripe for misunderstanding and lack of empathy on either side. At the heart of code reviews is collaboration. It is as important to remind yourself as a reviewer that you’re reviewing someone’s code and not passing judgments on them as a person and it is equally important to remember that whatever your reviewer tells you is not meant as a personal attack.

I hate to let the cat out of the bag, but it’s not a huge surprise to me that the underlying economics of the business would be the strongest predictor of interest for VCs. Still though, you should at least skim this…

We analyzed the results of our first 500 reviews and calculated the correlations between high marks in categories like team, problem area and business economics with the number of requested intros from our reviewing VCs. Overall, high scores on the review were a strong predictor of VC interest, but the results of the scores of the individual categories might surprise you.

In an effort to make my team write better SQL, I went over reports written by non-developers and code reviews, and gathered common mistakes and missed optimization opportunities in SQL.

Dividing integers, accidentally counting nullable columns, column position in GROUP BY and ORDER BY, and 9 other common gotchas. Don’t get got!

Front-enders should check this out! Johan Brandhorst reviews the history of gRPC in the browser, the state of things today, and thoughts on the future of gRPC-Web.

gRPC-Web is an excellent choice for web developers. It brings the portability, performance, and engineering of a sophisticated protocol into the browser, and marks an exciting time for frontend developers!

So far the benefits have largely only been available to mobile app and backend developers, whilst frontend developers have had to continue to rely on JSON REST interfaces as their primary means of information exchange. However, with the release of gRPC-Web, gRPC is poised to become a valuable addition in the toolbox of frontend developers.

In this episode of Spotlight recorded at OSCON London 2016, Jerod talked with Coby Chapple, a product designer at GitHub (since 2012), about projects, transactional code reviews, and GraphQL. Coby drops a lot of knowledge bombs in this interview. You don’t want to miss this episode.

Some of the engineers from Ooyala have released a new project that “makes code reviews fun.” It is a standalone piece of software that you host on your own (they recommend using Vagrant/VirtualBox).

With barkeep you get syntax-highlighted colored diffs, the ability to easily add your own features, a simple CLI, a REST API and plaintext (threadable) emails. Out of the box, barkeep offers many more features that will keep code reviews quick and entertaining. You can use barkeep with any git repo that has a reachable URL.

The team at Ooyala plans on growing barkeep as the community sees fit. Open issues as you play around with it – better yet, fork it and add new features yourself! Their style guidelines are simple: “mimic the style around you.”

You can view a live example, get some more information or browse the source at GitHub.

We’re on location at Microsoft Build 2025 with Amanda Silver, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Division. Amanda leads product, design, user research, and engineering systems for some of the tools you use every day. We discuss the latest AI announcements from Microsoft at Build 2025, how AI is reshaping development tools, what’s next for VS Code, TypeScript, GitHub’s evolution, and even emerging editors like Windsurf that are forking the VS Code ecosystem.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇