Reviewer Crash Course

by Sirryan

Hey everyone, I noticed some people were not sure how to approach reviewing PRs so I figured I would write up a small guide on PR reviewing and how people like our Headcoders, maintainers, Lewcc, S34N, and I all do our jobs. In addition to some guidance and pointers on PR reviewing, I will also go over a few code examples and point out code standard corrections and basic errors that prospective reviewers can begin to start on.

What is code review?

Code reviews act as quality assurance of the code base.... and can also act as a second step in identifying bugs, logic problems, or uncovered edge cases. (source)

This is a quote from a gitlab article on the importance of code reviews and code reviewer teams. It refers to code reviews as a process in which code is scrutinized (often by more experienced developers); In this process bugs, bad logic, and unforeseen consequences of changes are uncovered and identified. This implies that some code will not be high quality, it will have bugs, the logic used may be illogical, and the actual execution of the code may produce results not originally intended by the author. By addressing these quality issues in review, we can eliminate security issues, increase collaboration, discover bugs earlier, share knowledge, enforce code standards, and ultimately improve our game.

Understanding code review first comes from understanding what a pull request is and the process contributors go through to add their code to the Paradise Station codebase. When a community member wants to alter the game in some format, be it a feature, backend processes, or artistic style, they must modify our game code in some fashion. They will often do this through services such as visual studio code, GitHub desktop, gitkraken, tortoisegit, etc. Eventually they will be ready to request that our repository owners merge their new changes into the codebase. This is a pull request.

This is the point where code review comes in. The author’s code is now publicly visible and therefor available for anyone with an account to review. If you have closely followed any PR that changed code in a significant way, you will see that many people will chip in with their opinion or “comment” on code snippets.

This is the most basic form of review. Most people may understand “code review” as developers suggesting changes to the authors proposed changes or providing critical review of a code structure; Ultimately, review is just a conversation between two developers. Feedback, questions, and advice are all valid and necessary parts of the code review as much as a code suggestion or comment may be. In fact, it may be even more important than suggesting the author change a src.loc to a loc. Questions such as “What does X do?” or “I know that Y has done this before, what happens when Z?” ask the author to take a closer look at their own code and help you understand their intention and goals. Please note: ITS IMPORTANT TO READ PR DESCRIPTIONS, you should not be reviewing a PR until you know what it’s actually attempting to do.

But Sirryan, that’s not the kind of code review I’m interested in learning about. Yes, yes, I know, I’m getting there. While its important to understand the conversation (and relationship-building) parts of code review, there’s also important technical parts to review that keep our codebase moving. Before getting into HOW to code review, we will take a look at the two types of technical code reviews.

Comments

Basic comments are when a reviewer leaves a message, question, or directive for the PR author at a certain code line or chunk. For example, SteelSlayer has left a comment on Line 12 of objective.dm inquiring about a certain variable. The focus of this conversation here is on this one comment and there is room for the author (and possibly other reviewers) to enter the discussion. Commenting on specific places on code helps keep the conversation focused and allows minor issues to be addressed quickly and efficiently.

Suggestions

Suggestions are when a reviewer suggests/requests a change to a certain line or chunk of code. This leaves less agency for the PR author (especially when suggested by a development team member or experienced reviewer) but allows for the issue to be cleared up much more quickly and with only the click of a couple buttons. In this case, I have physically wrote out the code I would like to change this line to, in this case I want if(contents.len>=max_n_of_items) changed to if(length(contents) >= max_n_of_items). These types of reviews are most critical for enforcing code standards and making 1-5 line corrections.

Leaving PR Reviews

The way you leave any form of comment or suggestion directly on a line or chunk of code is under the “Files Changed” tab of the pull request. All you need to do now is scroll down to a line of code that you want to comment on and hover over it, a blue plus button will appear and you can click on it to open a comment menu.

You can leave feedback, ask questions, whatever. If you want to suggest changes to the code, you will need to click the code review icon on the text tool bar. This will automatically populate a suggestion template in your comment, everything inside the triple tildes will be part of the suggested code. The code inside initially will be identical to the PR authors code but you can do whatever to it, including changes values, editing indentation, or even adding/removing entire lines.

Finally, once you wish to submit this comment or suggestion you have two options. You can just submit it as is, or you can add it to a batched review (referred to as “start a review”). If you are doing many comments/suggestion(2+), you should batch your reviews. If you do batch your reviews, you can submit them together in the top right of the files changes tab once done.

What can I start reviewing?

So you know what reviewing is, you know how to review, and you’re ready to review.... but what do you review? Knowledge of code and willingness to understand our currently implemented systems is critically important to being able to review pull requests. However, there are a few “code standards” you can look out for on PR’s to get familiarized with the code review process and get a few reviews under your belt.

Problematic Code Examples

Lets say a contributor has opened a pull request adding a brand-new item to the game. This item has a few special functions and procs that you need to look over. I will go through each part of this code that I would leave comments or suggestions on, for the most part this covers all the basic things you will look out for as a beginner code reviewer.

/obj/item/omega
    name = "Omega Item"
    desc = "This object is super duper cool!!!"
    icon = 'icons/obj/food/food.dmi'
    icon_state = "omega"
    w_class = WEIGHT_CLASS_SMALL
    throw_speed = 3
    //determines whether the person using this is "cool" or not
    var/is_cool = null
    var/list/announce_verbs = list(cool,epic,sick,spectacular)

/obj/item/omega/attack_self(mob/user)
    if(user)
        if(is_user_cool(user) && istype(usr, /mob/living/carbon/human))
            to_chat(usr, "[usr] is very [pick(announce_verbs)]")
            is_cool = TRUE
            return
        to_chat(usr, "<span class='notice'>[usr] is not very [pick(announce_verbs)]")
        is_cool = FALSE
        return

/obj/item/omega/proc/is_user_cool(mob/user)
    if(istype(usr, /mob/living/carbon/human))
        return 1
    return 0

First var/is_cool = null needs to be corrected to var/is_cool. Any time you establish a variable in its definition, it will initialize as ‘null’ if you do not provide a default value. Therefor, we don’t need to assign it a default value of null because it’s redundant.

Second I immediately see a spacing problem with the list variable, there’s not spacing between comma separators list(cool,epic,sick,spectacular), you should correct this to be list(cool, epic, sick, spectacular)

/obj/item/omega
    name = "Omega Item"
    desc = "This object is super duper cool!!!"
    icon = 'icons/obj/food/food.dmi'
    icon_state = "omega"
    w_class = WEIGHT_CLASS_SMALL
    throw_speed = 3
    //determines whether the person using this is "cool" or not
    var/is_cool
    var/list/announce_verbs = list(cool, epic, sick, spectacular)

Lets move onto the attack_self proc now.

We can see that it takes one parameter: mob/user. The first thing that immediately catches my eye is the liberal use of usr. Now, usr is a native variable of dm that refers to the mob or user that initiated the calling of the proc, however this doesn’t always mean that usr is the same thing as mob/user and may even change depending on the context in which the proc is called. However, we know that mob/user will always be the user we need here (unless someone screwed up elsewhere) and will use that instead of `usr.

Next, our first to_chat call is miss a span class definition. We will add that in <span class='notice'> and close it with </span> within the parentheses. With that in mind, we also notice that the second to_chat forgot to close their span, so we will do that as well.

/obj/item/omega/attack_self(mob/user)
    if(user)
        if(is_user_cool(user) && istype(user, /mob/living/carbon/human))
            to_chat(user, "<span class='notice'>[user] is very [pick(announce_verbs)]</span>")
            is_cool = TRUE
            return
        to_chat(user, "<span class='notice'>[user] is not very [pick(announce_verbs)]</span>")
        is_cool = FALSE
        return

Now lets take a look at the logic here. What does if(is_user_cool(user) && istype(user, /mob/living/carbon/human)) do? It’s performing an istype check, and also checking for the return of is_user_cool()

/obj/item/omega/proc/is_user_cool(mob/user)
    if(istype(usr, /mob/living/carbon/human))
        return 1
    return 0

More issues! First and foremost, we know that this proc is supposed to return TRUE or FALSE so we want to make sure to correct those 0s and 1s to their respective FALSE and TRUE defines. We should also nip that usr. One final thing with this proc in particular when using istype’s, we sometimes already have defines for specific types. In this case, we already have an ishuman() define

#define ishuman(A) (istype(A, /mob/living/carbon/human))

Lets make those corrections

/obj/item/omega/proc/is_user_cool(mob/user)
    if(ishuman(user))
        return TRUE
    return FALSE

Now lets looks at the big picture, you may have noticed that we perform the same istype check twice. The author appears to have accidentally added redundant code in their if check. Let’s fix that for them:

if(is_user_cool(user))

Lets put all of our suggested changes together!

/obj/item/omega
    name = "Omega Item"
    desc = "This object is super duper cool!!!"
    icon = 'icons/obj/food/food.dmi'
    icon_state = "omega"
    w_class = WEIGHT_CLASS_SMALL
    throw_speed = 3
    //determines whether the person using this is "cool" or not
    var/is_cool
    var/list/announce_verbs = list(cool, epic, sick, spectacular)

/obj/item/omega/attack_self(mob/user)
    if(user)
        if(is_user_cool(user))
            to_chat(user, "<span class='notice'>[user] is very [pick(announce_verbs)]</span>")
            is_cool = TRUE
            return
        to_chat(user, "<span class='notice'>[user] is not very [pick(announce_verbs)]</span>")
        is_cool = FALSE
        return

/obj/item/omega/proc/is_user_cool(mob/user)
    if(ishuman(user))
        return TRUE
    return FALSE

That code looks a lot better, it’s not perfect and it may not be “balanced” but the code is much cleaner and even less prone to failure. There is still 7 minor issues or possibly problematic code in this pull request that can be fixed (and one that will cause compile errors or runtimes!); I invite you to look for them and share in the replies to this post what they are and how you would suggest to fix them as a PR reviewer.

The Art of Code

… I like it because I could make the computer do what I wanted and every time I did that, I got this little thrill and this rush and throughout my entire career. That thrill for me has never gone away [The Art of Code - Dylan Beattie]

This segment might be a bit corny but I figured it would be important to include because I felt like it was an important aspect of reviewing that I’ve always had to keep in mind (and constantly struggle with). Code is not just code, it’s the work or “artwork” of someone else who may have spent a significant amount of time writing it. Like any language, dreammaker is not particularly easy to learn for the average player, many of us didn’t learn a coding language before trying our hand at contributing to the codebase.

Not All Code Is Equal

What I mean by this is not that there is some amount of “worth” conferred between two different works of code; For you and me, we likely have differing levels of skill, so you writing code for a new custom mob may be extremely easy but for me, it may be extremely difficult and one of the more difficult tasks I have attempted. At the same time, I may be much better at working with complex datums whereas you don’t know where to start to build those into a larger system. We all enter into our dev community with differing levels of skills and talents, reviewers need to recognize this.

This appreciation of diverse abilities is important in the sense that we should not impose judgment on other people’s code immediately. Do your absolute best to avoid coming across as hostile, demanding, or rude in your review comments. Positive and constructive feedback is important. Most of the time, bad code is just a consequence of the coder not knowing how to properly do something and should be treated as a learning experience.

Conclusion

This is the end of the guide, I do hope to write an intermediate guide in the future but I hope this serves well as an entry into reviewing. As always, questions are always welcome (and criticism/recommendations to this guide).