[albany-pm] Tech meeting

Leander Hasty taril42 at gmail.com
Tue Sep 30 09:15:49 PDT 2014


On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 11:26 AM, Patrick Cronin <oshihuna at gmail.com> wrote:
> Great meeting last night. I got my first code review on a tiny script and
> the feedback was super useful.

As a tiny bit of followup, and to possibly generate some discussion,
I'm attaching a few pages from our internal wiki (HTML only, zipped up
together) on our code review guidelines and such.  This stuff leans
heavily toward C++ in some areas, and some of it is skewed toward our
corner of the gamedev industry, but some of it is very general, too.

Rather than fighting any mailinglist filters, here's a Google Drive
link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B05LWIT5_ltRaVlkNC04QXlCcFU/edit?usp=sharing

We have a bit of a "tiered" coding standard.  We start with just three
items in [[Programming/Philosophy]] -- "if you're only going to
remember three things, remember these general principles", and then
expand outwards.  "The Basics" section at the top of
[[Programming/Coding Standard]] expands this to a small but still
general set of 9 guidelines, then the rest of that doc dives into C++
minutia, but the principle of trying to keep 3 really big things, then
~7-10 of the most common problems around somewhere has helped us
tremendously.

People aren't expected to know the whole coding standard backwards and
forwards, just those top items.  To reinforce that, we encourage folks
to build their own personal version of something like
[[Programming/Code Review Guidelines]] -- a single sheet checklist
they can take with them to code reviews.  (Even that is broken up into
"three biggest things to remember when reviewing" followed by more
detailed lists.)

The [[Production/Checkin Policy]] covers some of the more "meta" stuff
about how we operate -- small commits, in-person code reviews
pre-commit whenever possible, etc.  It gets into some of the common
problems associated with SVN, but again, most of it is pretty general.
[[IT/SVN Best Practices]] is mostly irrelevant unless you're a
Subversion user, but the section about "Messages" has some interesting
stuff about commit message composition that I thought people might
find interesting in light of last night's conversation.

We also discussed briefly the idea of documentation reviews -- I
included our [[MDD Example]] page.  An MDD is a "miniature design
document" -- the idea is a half-page to page document to cover the
next half-day to day of work or so (possibly less, possibly more).
The format has worked pretty well for us, although we do encourage
folks to break outside that format and do whatever works (even "photo
of whiteboard" may suffice, here), as long as it meets the goals
described therein.

--
Leander


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