Engineering Culture by InfoQ

The Evolution of Code Review: From Bug-Finding to Team Building

6 snips
Sep 5, 2025
Guest
Greg Foster
In this engaging discussion, Greg Foster, a DevTools engineer at Graphite and former Airbnb expert, shares insights on the evolving purpose of code reviews. He emphasizes their role in team building, highlighting kindness, expertise, and urgency as essential traits for effective engineering teams. The conversation also explores how AI tools are revolutionizing coding processes, the necessity for engineers to adapt their skills, and the importance of fostering a collaborative culture rooted in shared values. Innovative practices from tech giants are also featured!
Ask episode
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
INSIGHT

Code Review Is For Sharing Context

  • Code review's original purpose was bug finding, but modern tooling (CI, linting) has shifted its highest value to sharing context and learning.
  • Greg Foster argues code review is now primarily a collaboration and education practice rather than the primary bug catcher.
ADVICE

Three Traits That Make Teams Magical

  • Hire and build teams that are kind, expert, and have urgency to create sustainable high performance.
  • Avoid teams missing any of these three elements because their absence breaks team effectiveness quickly.
ADVICE

Get Expertise Through Tight Feedback Loops

  • Get rapid, hands-on experience and tighten feedback loops (on-call, incidents, deployments) to build real expertise fast.
  • Volunteer for hard rotations and reflect on postmortems to accelerate learning through high-rep cycles.
Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode
Get the app