Background
At LEI (Lab for Emerging Intelligence) UC San Diego, we are developing GenAI powered applications at the university. As such, we primarily hire undergraduates to take on such projects. However, the projects involve writing and deploying applications for thousands of users. This requires us to write high quality code that is easy to maintain.
As part of these efforts, we are internally running a Code Review Contest to help people read code and understand what is required from them in terms of code style, documentation and quality. Furthermore, the contest helps get reviews out faster so that PRs are not bottlenecked by few.
Rules
- Every week, everybody must review one PR per week
- The winner must review at least 2 PR
- People must review PRs in repository they do not actively contribute code to (for it to count in this contest; the idea is people have to read the issue and related documentation so they understand what documentation needs to be written in their respective repository)
- For their to be a weekly winner, everybody must review a PR (so that one doesn’t hog up reviewing all PRs or in case there are too few PR in a week)
- This can not distract from assigned work
- Weekly Pot: $10
If nobody wins, then the money goes into the monthly pot which goes to the person with highest reviews.
Contest runs till end of August.
Weekly Leaderboard
Week 1: June 24th to June 27th
| Name | Reviews |
|---|---|
| Laura Fleig (GitHub Profile) | 1 |
| Ziyue (Tim) Liu (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Mahesh Bharadwaj (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Matthew David (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Siddhant Kumar (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
Weekly Winner: Nobody since not everyone completed their PRs and nobody did 2 PRs
Week 2: July 1st to July 7th
| Name | Reviews |
|---|---|
| Mahesh Bharadwaj (GitHub Profile) | 3 |
| Matthew David (GitHub Profile) | 1 |
| Siddhant Kumar (GitHub Profile) | 1 |
| Laura Fleig (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Ziyue (Tim) Liu (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
Weekly Winner: Nobody since not everyone completed their PRs
Week 3: July 8th to July 15th
| Name | Reviews |
|---|---|
| Mahesh Bharadwaj (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Matthew David (GitHub Profile) | 1 |
| Siddhant Kumar (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Laura Fleig (GitHub Profile) | 1 |
| Ziyue (Tim) Liu (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Sophia Yu (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
Weekly Winner: Nobody since not everyone completed their PRs
Week 4: July 15th to July 22nd
| Name | Reviews |
|---|---|
| Laura Fleig (GitHub Profile) | 1 |
| Mahesh Bharadwaj (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Matthew David (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Siddhant Kumar (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Ziyue (Tim) Liu (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Sophia Yu (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
Weekly Winner: Nobody since not everyone completed their PRs
Week 5: July 22nd to July 29th
| Name | Reviews |
|---|---|
| Laura Fleig (GitHub Profile) | 1 |
| Mahesh Bharadwaj (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Matthew David (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Siddhant Kumar (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Ziyue (Tim) Liu (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Sophia Yu (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
Weekly Winner: Nobody since not everyone completed their PRs
Week 6: July 29th to August 5th
| Name | Reviews |
|---|---|
| Laura Fleig (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Mahesh Bharadwaj (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Matthew David (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Siddhant Kumar (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Ziyue (Tim) Liu (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
| Sophia Yu (GitHub Profile) | 0 |
Weekly Winner: Nobody since not everyone completed their PRs
Monthly Leaderboard
June / July
| Name | Total Reviews |
|---|---|
| Laura Fleig (GitHub Profile) | 4 |
| Mahesh Bharadwaj (GitHub Profile) | 3 |
| Matthew David (GitHub Profile) | 2 |
| Siddhant Kumar (GitHub Profile) | 1 |
Winner: Laura Fleig (GitHub Profile)
Current Value: $50
Conclusion
The contest ended.
I am not sure code reviews improved much since I was busy with other matters than running the contest. It did increase communication in the team as people tried others pull request. I do believe it was a net positive and certainly worth more than money I paid out for it.
My hypothesis: It might be useful to teach people to write issues and review pull requests is better than teaching them how to code. In fact to any non-CS fresh graduates people out there, I hope I never have to see your code. It infuriates me to no extent.