Stage 4 of 8 · 8 lessons · ~4 weeks
Your first pull requests
Open small, well-described pull requests, take review without taking it personally, start reviewing others, test your changes and learn how your team avoids and handles production problems.
Start: Keeping pull requests smallLessons· one lesson for each topic, in this order
- 1Keeping pull requests smallLesson
- 2Descriptions and self-reviewLesson
- 3Testing your change and passing CILesson
- 4Receiving code review without taking it personallyLesson
- 5Reviewing other people's codeLesson
- 6Not breaking productionLesson
- 7Incidents and on-call at a junior levelLesson
- 8Owning your mistakesLesson
Do this
- Keep each pull request to one change and split any larger work into steps that merge independently.
- Review your own diff before requesting review, and write what, why, how tested and where to look.
- Add or update a test with every change, and never skip a failing test to get CI green.
- Reply to every review comment, and ask when you do not understand one.
- Review at least one teammate's pull request each week, labelling comments as blocking or not.
- Write down how your team releases, uses feature flags and rolls back.
- Read two past incident reports and the runbook for the area you work on.
Start with· follow one of these
- GuideFreeGoogle Engineering Practices
Google · Intermediate
Google's guides for change authors and reviewers: small changes, good descriptions and handling comments
- BookPaidThe Missing README: A Guide for the New Software Engineer
Chris Riccomini and Dmitriy Ryaboy (No Starch Press) · Beginner · $29.99 print, $23.99 ebook
The testing, code review, delivery and on-call chapters written for a new engineer
Practise
Keep handy
Also worth your time
Before moving on: Three merged pull requests with clear descriptions and tests, at least three reviews you gave with labelled comments, and a one-page note on how your team releases, rolls back and handles incidents.
Small pull requests are the single easiest habit that makes a junior look senior. And when you break something, and you will, say it in the channel within minutes. Nobody remembers the bug. Everybody remembers who hid one.