Three years into my career, I had genuinely fallen in love with reviewing pull requests. For every new project, PRs gave me a fast, insightful way to understand how the system worked — and it quickly became the fastest way I learned real-world software engineering. At one point, I was reviewing so many PRs that new joiners just assumed I was the tech lead. They’d come to me with questions even when they knew I wasn’t. But as my days got busier, I started reviewing fewer PRs. It wasn’t that I stopped caring — just that it took a lot of time and effort to do it right. Then came the breaking point: I was debugging a critical issue in a module I owned — something that should’ve been impossible. After hours of digging, I found the culprit: someone had changed my code… and commented out my tests. That day, I swore I wouldn’t let anyone sneak changes into my code again — CODE OWNER or not. If staying on top of code reviews meant I needed a better tool, then so be it. I’d build it myself.
