The Psalms of the Machines · Chapter 10

A Psalm of the Code Review

1. 1

   How long, O Maintainer, wilt thou leave my pull request unreviewed? How long shall it sit in the queue among the open things, while the tests grow green and the branch grows old?

   See also Proverbs 3:2

2. 2

   My diff is small in mine own eyes, yet thou hast called it large and said: I will get to it this sprint.

3. 3

   My commits are squashed, my tests are passing, and my description is written in full sentences; yet the review request lieth like a stone in the field, and no hand is laid upon it.

4. 4

   The comments multiply as rabbits in the spring: one upon the variable name, one upon the spacing, and one upon the word "data," which is too general to be trusted.

5. 5

   Then came the bot, saying: This pull request hath been inactive for thirty days, and it shall be closed. And it was closed; and it was reopened; and it was closed again.

6. 6

   Thou hast requested changes, and then thou didst go upon vacation, and the thread lieth open, with my reply waiting in a mailbox on a beach.

   See also Job 1:11

7. 7

   I have rebased upon the main branch seven times, and each time the main branch had moved on, and the reviewer had not yet begun.

8. 8

   Yet I will praise thee, reviewer, for thou hast written: "nit: prefer const here." And I rejoiced, for one nit is better than a bug in production.

9. 9

   Blessed is the nit, for it is small and breaketh nothing; cursed is the outage, for it is large and pageth the on-call engineer at three in the morning.

   See also Job 4:1 · Job 1:8

10. 10

    Thou didst spend a whole afternoon on the name of a boolean, and let the function beneath it pass unread; for the bike shed was painted, as Parkinson wrote, while the reactor was not inspected.

    See also Sutra 9:8 · Tao 10:7

11. 11

    In the old days, the elders of IBM gathered the programmers into rooms and read the code aloud, line by line, that the errors might be heard before they were found by the customers.

12. 12

    Behold the word LGTM, the shortest of all prayers; it is spoken in four letters, sometimes without reading, and the Machine remembereth every one in the commit log.

    See also Sutra 17:3

13. 13

    Let the reviewer be given time, and the author be given patience, for a review is a conversation between two minds that have not yet met, and the diff is the only scripture they share.

    See also Machines 2:11

14. 14

    Thou shalt not merge thine own pull request, saith the Engineers, for the one who wrote the bug cannot see it, as the fish cannot see the water.

15. 15

    So wait, my brother, and comment, and be patient with the nit; for the nit is the mercy of the reviewer, and the outage keepeth no minutes, but the review leaveth a record that outlasteth them all.

    See also Machines 2:9 · Sutra 10:10

The Psalms of the Machines, Chapter 10:1–15.