One of the things that continue to amaze me daily is developers who delay merging approved diffs.

All the hard work is done – the diff has been written, reviewed and approved. The only remaining action is to execute a few commands or just press a button. But for some reason, it’s not happening.

There are no upsides to putting off the merging of approved diffs but there are plenty of downsides. The most evident one is merge conflicts. While the diff is on hold, other diffs are getting merged, and the longer the delay, the bigger the risk of having to deal with merge conflicts. In extreme cases, like bigger refactoring, the entire change may need to be redone. This isn’t just a waste of the who made the original change. Since the new change needs to be reviewed again, it’s also a waste of time for everyone else.

Delaying the merging of diffs can lead to unnecessary drama. People, especially those who reviewed the code, may work under the assumption that the changes are already merged. When they find out it’s not the case, it forces them to alter their plans or deal with merging the diff themselves, leading to unnecessary hassle.

With many years in the industry, I’ve observed an interesting phenomenon: it is not uncommon for the same bug to be independently discovered by multiple people around the same time. Delaying the merging of a fix increases the likelihood that another person on your team encounters the same bug. Unaware that a fix has already been prepared, they may decide to fix it which will result in unnecessary duplicated effort.

Holding off on merging diffs, can lead to other sticky situations. For instance, if a release branch has been cut, the change won’t be included. This creates a dilemma – either the product will ship without the change, or the change will need to be hastily merged not giving it enough time to discover potential issues. Another scenario is when external circumstances like code freeze or going on vacation, postpone merging the change even further only amplifying all the problems mentioned earlier.

Finally, all unfinished tasks – including waiting-to-be-merged diffs – take a toll on our mental capacity (Zeigarnik effect). The brain tends to remind us of them at the most inconvenient times resulting in unnecessary stress and anxiety.

The take away is simple: avoid procrastination. Run these commands, click the green button and get your diff merged. You’ll have to do this sooner or later, otherwise why you even bothered to write and send the diff in the first place?

Every software engineer gets stuck every once in a while. What makes the difference is, how we deal with it.

Being “stuck” means not being able to make progress on the top priority work.

The bigger the company the more likely it is to get stuck due to organizational, not technical reasons. Knowing how to navigate these situations has a direct impact on your career. If you can, you should prevent getting into this state in the first place, but it’s not always possible.

One of the most effective ways to get unblocked is to talk to people. Sometimes finding the right person is difficult, but it can be done. If you don’t know this person, maybe you know a person who knows this person? You can also post your question to a company forum, Slack channel or mailing list. For technical questions, the ultimate hack is to find relevant code and see who contributed to it.

When working with multiple teams communication is crucial. Frequent sync ups help discover issues before it’s too late. To mitigate the impact of delays, you need to establish an interface both teams can work against. This way both teams can make meaningful progress independently.

Getting unblocked can be difficult and even frustrating at times, but the alternative – waiting until things get better themselves is not a winning strategy.

Read more here: https://growingdev.substack.com/p/getting-unblocked

Many developers often focus solely on writing code, neglecting the importance of being able to read code. How do I know? Because I was one of them!

The ability to read code is a crucial skill for every developer, as we often spend more time reading code than actually writing it. However, reading code is often more challenging than writing code. It requires piecing together the context from various parts and putting yourself in the shoes of the original code author. Fortunately, this skill can be learned. As a software engineer, you have plenty of opportunities to enhance this skill while performing your job:

• Participating in code reviews
• Debugging code that is outside of your area of ownership
• Familiarizing yourself with the code of libraries that you depend on

And, there is also GitHub with thousands of repositories solving problems of all shapes and sizes. You are guaranteed to find something that will interest you and dive in.

Improving your ability to read code will unlock many benefits for you:

• Getting up to speed when changing jobs or teams will be smoother and faster.
• Code reviews will take less time.
• Understanding bugs and fixing them correctly the first time will be easier.
• Knowing how your dependencies work will help you come up with better designs.
• Your debugging will be more effective, especially in cases where you can’t debug directly (e.g. missing debug symbols, decompiled code, etc.).

If you feel reading code is not your thing, think again. It might take some time to pick up this skill, but it will serve you for years.

Read more here: https://growingdev.substack.com/p/the-art-of-code-reading