Join me later today for my next weekly livestream. Today, before I start live coding, I’ll be doing an Ask-me-Anything session. Come with your questions about CI/CD, coding, my favorite pizza toppings, or anything else!

Can’t make it live? Send me your question ahead of time, then watch the replay.

I have a confession to make.

I messed up.

I’ll try to do better.

I wasted 2 weeks of learning opportunity, and customer frustration.

You see, one of my clients had a new developer join the team recently. And this new developer submitted a simple pull request to add some error monitoring to the frontend. It wasn’t a perfect PR. In fact, it had a large number of problems. Many of them just based on misunderstanding of our code.

So what did I do?

The wrong thing.

I responded in GitHub.

Then the author made some changes. Some were okay, others weren’t.

So I responded in GitHub.

Again.

And again.

There were more GitHub comments on the PR than lines of code changed.

What’s more, it took 2 weeks!

If I had just hopped on a call with this new team member, we could have had the PR completed in an hour.

That would have meant 2 weeks more of learning about frontend errors. It would mean 2 weeks less of frustration from users experiencing those errors. It would have meant a lot less wasted time on the part of the PR’s author, and my time as a reviewer. And it probably would have lead to better learning for the new team member.

I’m sorry, dear new team member. I’ll try to do better next time.