In my previous blog post, I went over what it was like on an engineer’s first day at Battlefy.
Today I want to delve a little deeper into developing at Battlefy, and talk about our code review process. Our goal in code reviews is to share knowledge, improve the code-base, and get actionable feedback so you as a developer can be a better version of yourself.
Depending on the issue, you generally won’t find sweeping architectural changes in a pull request — this is because we always discuss architecture, technical debt, scalability, and performance enhancements in a separate meeting every Monday called Dev Huddle.
At Battlefy, we practice Branch By Feature. The benefits of this approach makes it so multiple product teams can work in parallel, test features in isolation, and get focused code reviews in our pull requests.
For an engineer going into a code review, it can seem daunting because your hard work will be put on a microscope. Let’s dispel that right now. At Battlefy, code reviews are meant to be a thorough, fun, welcoming, and positive environment for engineers across all seniority levels. It’s important that any reviewer have empathy for the developers behind the pull request. At Battlefy we respect the effort that has been put into building, and testing the feature, and appreciate that these developers are putting their hard work out into the open for the first time.
Once you’ve taken in the feedback, you’ve made changes (if any), and your tests pass CI (we use CircleCI), your reviewers will approve the pull request and you can merge the feature branch into our integration branch (develop), which then kicks off another build to run through the test suite and deploy a preview on Netlify.
When you’re ready to ship to production, you can create a pull request into master from develop. Front-end deployments should only take about 3 minutes as we currently use an amazing service called Netlify that’s able to geographically distribute our front-end applications. The obvious benefit here is that a global esports platform, our customers outside of North America noticed a huge increase in site performance.
Faster pages, happier users, more competitive play on Battlefy!
On the whole, our code review process has been highly successful in sharing knowledge across the organization, improve the codebase, and help our developers get better everyday. We’re always looking for ways to improve it — perhaps you’re the engineer that can help us make it better!
Cheers,
Jaime Bueza
Thanks to Adam Seckel, John Koob, Jared Daley, Ronald Chen, Feng Wu and Justin Wong for reading drafts of this.
Battlefy is hiring! We value passion and drive but we also believe that diversity is the key to success for every high growth technology startup. We welcome people from all walks of life.
We take care of the people, the products, the profits — in that order.
