Niko, doko?

Over the past few years, auto-formatting utilities (that do code formatting for you) such as gofmt , black or google-java-format have become increasingly popular. While such tools undoubtedly provide some benefits when used from the start of a project, changing the code style of an entire codebase is hard. The larger it is, the harder it is to break through its inertia… Which begs the question: is it worth it?

As software engineers, our relationship with best practices is an evolving one. We start off unaware of what they are. One day, because someone told us or because we read about it somewhere, we discover them. This is usually where we start to revere them as some kind of holy scripture. The cleaner our code gets, the more obsessed we become. For many of us, it can take a while before we open our eyes again to the cold, hard truth: best practices are nothing but tools.

Writing code reviews, on GitHub or elsewhere, is a central part of a software engineer’s daily life. Yet, it is a task unlike any other: in addition to technical knowledge, a substantial amount of tact and subtlety is required in order to go past differences of opinion and establish a fruitful dialogue. This is of course true for both the one reviewing and the one being reviewed, but it is undeniable that, as the one initiating the discussion, the reviewer bears an even greater responsibility.