Please help with pull request reviews!

[CommanderStorm]

We have a huge number of open pull requests, and it's unfortunate that so many of them stay open for so long before being reviewed or merged. I'd like to change this situation.

Important

Obviously, there are more than pull requests.
Contributing to features, bugs, docs or by helping people are great ways to empower others (and thus you!).

The main bottleneck that we have currently is more pull requests being created than the maintainers can review each week.
Reviewing PRs is often time consuming, and with the best will in the world there's only so many that I can manage each week. It's also often a bit emotionally draining for me, since I don't enjoy saying no to PRs, or asking other volunteers to do even more work (e.g. making more changes to their PR). But rather than having fewer PRs opened each week (which would be a bad situation), I would like to get more reviews completed each week instead.

The best thing that you can do to help is to review someone else's PR.
Don't worry, there's over 95 open today, I'm sure you can find one of interest to you!
Please take a look at it, read through it, have a think about the problem and the proposed solution and see what comes to mind. Maybe you'll spot that there's actually an underlying problem that should be solved instead (#6200 is a great example of this), or you would have a different approach if you did it yourself, or you apply some of our "internal" pr reiew guidelines and can help other contributors shape up their PR. That way the PR will become easier for the maintainers to review and merge when they get to it.

All of this helps share the workload for the maintainers. And it's the main path to becoming a maintainer yourself! I would also love to see a few more maintainers in the team.

I'm happy to help anyone who is helping out with the work of reviewing PRs, since I think it's the main thing that is limiting our progress right now.

[lupaulus]

Asking if AI Reviews or add CI Linter/Rules can help to reduce the workload ?

I find personally they reduce, some pure 'developers' mistakes or bugs,
that a new features or fix can introduce to the code.

I try to help the best I can do

I can ask my university students, if they are someone interested to help, that can enhanced their Curriculum Vitae.

Best Regards

[CommanderStorm]

Asking if AI Reviews or add CI Linter/Rules can help to reduce the workload ?

Maybe?
Most review issues aren’t recurring enough to justify rules, and the AI review tools I tried (like Coderabbit) tend to produce a lot of noise. Maybe that can be tuned, or they have improved.
You likely have more experience in this than I have, are there tools you can recomend?

What would be nice to enable is Copilot reviews. It is fairly helpful for catching typos.
@louislam could you enable this in the settings?

I can ask my university students, if they are someone interested to help, that can enhanced their Curriculum Vitae.

Reading “weird code” (all code written by others is weird) is actually a great way to develop better taste.
Not sure if it improves a CV directly, but being a better Software engineer does.

If I could give one piece of advice to your students, it would rather be:

"Do quality work."

Why?
Because dumping untested, vibe-coded contributions doesn’t make you more employable - but doing something well absolutely does.

[louislam]

Just enabled in the ruleset, not sure if it is enough though.

[CommanderStorm]

@louislam could you turn off Review new pushes branch protections?
One intial review is likely best for spam avoidance.

[louislam]

Just unchecked.

[CommanderStorm]

Thanks ❤️