September 30, 2023 — This talk explains how to make the most of the code review process.

Topics include:

– giving and receiving feedback
– focusing on the right things
– handling conflicts
– review of a real-world case study
– recommended tools and techniques

Good code reviews create a positive, collaborative culture that leads to not only better code but a happier and more productive work environment. Learn how to embrace code reviews as opportunities for improvement.

Whether you’re taking on a new project or just checking a pull request, code reviews can help with quality control, bug catching, and knowledge sharing.

December 29, 2020 — On the surface, the idea of code review is a no-brainer: why wouldn’t we want a second set of eyes on our code, especially before deploying to production?

As we peel back the layers, however, we find that the topic of code review is much more nuanced. How detailed should the review be? Who is qualified to perform the review (hint: it’s not just senior developers)? Can we afford to take another developer away from their project to review this one? What steps can we take to ensure reviews are constructive, rather than demoralizing?

Attendees will gain deeper insight into some of the arguments for and against systemic, peer code review, as well as pick up some useful tools to make code review a natural part of their teams’ workflow.

June 18, 2020 — When done right, code review is a great tool for levelling up developers and sharing knowledge, but when done wrong it can have a hugely negative effect, causing stress, demoralisation and burn out.
In this talk, Sarah will explore some simple ways to ensure you get more from code review, how it can become a tool for good and can help improve developers’ knowledge and skills, instead of just fixing current code issues.

July 13, 2019 — Dreb will go over the the importance and the process of code review in delivering a secured and performant WordPress powered sites. He’ll mainly touch on a few things such as what are the most common things to check or look for when you review code, ways to remediate potential flags or errors, and how we can simplify the code review process by taking advantage of several open-source tools.

January 10, 2019 — Code review: You know you should be doing it. Or maybe you don’t. The benefits of code review are enormous, and if you’re contributing to WordPress or another open source project, it’s required. What should contributors expect during code review? How do we balance the code review workflow without slowing good ideas down, and manage these reviews around deadlines and launch dates? What can we as contributors do during review to ensure new contributors are comfortable and given the right resources to learn and onboard to our codebase?

In this talk we’ll show you how we answered these questions at Boston University and went from years of committing directly to master to all designers and developers opening pull requests in a matter of months. Whether you lead, contribute, or both, you’ll leave with inspiration to guide your own process and goals for code review and tools to give helpful and empathetic feedback to the people around you.

January 2, 2019 — A code review process has lots of benefits. In addition to the many technical and organizational benefits, there are also invaluable opportunities to set team members up to grow and succeed when an effective code review culture is adopted by everyone.

While working at Boston University’s Interactive Design department, Jonathan helped create a code review process that not only met the organization’s technical needs, but also established a culture that encouraged collaboration between designers, developers, and other departments throughout the University through code reviews.

This talk is a guided tour through that new process. We’ll discuss the technical aspects (such as the tools and integrations used), the organizational and workflow aspects, as well as the human factors, which are often ignored but are the most important to establishing a sustainable code review culture that will help your organization flourish.

October 3, 2017 — Performance is a key metric of every website. In my talk I am going to show you code that I have seen in my life as a professional WordPress Developer and that could/should be improved. Furthermore I am going to show you how to change needed but slow code to asynchronous code which does not interfere with the user facing frontend.

Presentation Slides »

April 13, 2017 — If “WordPress is not testable” then why bother about testable code at all?

Because writing testable code is the first step to testing your code, testing your code is the first step to testing ALL your code, testing all your code is the first step to reduce shipping times, reducing shipping times is the first step to fast response to feature requests and bugs that makes clients happy.

And because the first sentence is less true every day.

Let’s find a definition of “testable code” that applies to both WordPress and the current practices of testing; let’s see how we can stop ignoring the elephant in the room and embrace testing with a sane approach that improves code and coders quality without leaving anyone out in the cold.

I will present real-world examples of new and existing code, the tools used to write and maintain testable code and some simple rule-of-thumbs to keep in mind when developing for our beloved CMS.

December 10, 2016 — Do you work in a development team or on an open source project? (Of course you do, because you work with WordPress.) 🙂 If you do, do you have a code review practice or set of guidelines? Let’s talk about why code review is a fantastic tool and can help you keep your code running optimally as much as possible.

We’ll discuss principles of code review, some examples of code review in practice, and easy ways for you to implement the basics of code review in your development practices.