Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

For a long time I thought a big pull request meant a productive week. Look how much I did. I’d hand a reviewer eight hundred lines and feel accomplished when they approved it.

They weren’t reviewing it. Nobody reviews eight hundred lines. They were skimming, trusting me, and clicking approve. The bugs I shipped in those years all slipped through that exact door — a change so large that reading it properly was more work than anyone had time for.

So I started making my changes small on purpose. The refactor goes in its own pull request. The behavior change goes in another. Each one does a single thing you can hold in your head at one sitting.

Two things happened. Reviews got faster, because a small diff is a question someone can actually answer. And they got sharper, because when a reviewer can see the whole change, they catch the thing I missed.

A small pull request isn’t slower. It’s the difference between being reviewed and being trusted. I’d rather be reviewed.

– Serguey Asael Shinder