In my career as a software engineer, I’ve contributed to dozens – perhaps even hundreds – of individual projects. It’s usually a pleasant experience. It is heartwarming and a source of joy for me to be able to help a project improve in some way, whether it is at work or in the wider open source community.
However, especially when I’m learning a new language or framework, sometimes I don’t always get it quite right. And that’s fine! I always try to learn from the feedback I receive. I find it a valuable experience to learn from code reviews. It helps me grow, both my skill, but also my knowledge of how other engineers approach things.
Unfortunately, sometimes code reviews do not contain constructive feedback or commentary. I have had my intelligence questioned, been insulted, called bad/mean names, and even had threats made on myself and my family. This really makes me sad and this is not the way that we should treat each other.
This has all come to my mind because of something that happened at work this week. One of my colleagues wasn’t quite sure on what I meant with one of my feedback on their merge request. We had a quick video chat, I explained, and we iterated on the idea and came up with an idea that was better than either one of us had alone.
But also, we were able to share some little updates of our personal lives. It was a lovely conversation and something I wish could happen more in open source communities as well. Remember that behind every line of code – well, at least not LLM generated code – is a living, breathing animal that has typed them!
This is what community development and teamwork can look like. We can work together to build things that are better than any of us could come up with alone. But first, we have to actually work together.
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