HACKER Q&A
📣 not_a_splchk

How to deal with spellcheck code reviews?


It's really hard writing code on my team. Some of the other devs get hung up on code style (naming things, formatting, and other important, but superficial things). These things literally don't matter to me, a name is a name that just becomes a reference in the computer and so long as it's readable and makes sense in context, I'm cool with it.

What usually happens though, is that no one actually reviews the architecture, finds edge cases, or actually thinks about what the code is doing or will do with invalid input. This means that when I review code, I'm having to duck and weave around comments about whether a variable name should be plural or not and point out logical issues with the code. This means I have to self-review my own code and find potential logical issues as well as deal with whether a variable name should be plural.

It's nice that the code is super readable with consistent naming though, until it breaks. For example, I had a review and had to rename all the files to plurals, because they decided, while I was sick, to use plurals. This was decided in a code review, btw, and not shared anywhere else. "I should have noticed all the other files in the directory were plural." But no one noticed the glaring bug that I myself nearly missed until I slept on it.

How can I get these members of my team to stop spellchecking and actually review the code?

Replace "plural" above with any favorite code style violation.


  👤 bradknowles Accepted Answer ✓
Implement coding standards as check-in hooks. You won’t be able to check in any code that doesn’t meet the coding standards.

Once everyone does that, then the humans can focus on the actual meat of what the code is supposed to be doing.