I worked at Envato for about two years and one of the biggest things that sticks with me is a tiny little blurb that was in all of our Pull Request templates: Remember, a Pull Request is the start of a conversation, not the end of one.

Sometimes I think developers forget about this and can come off as defensive or irritable when they get a lot of unexpected feedback or changes on a PR.

I’ve done it myself earlier on in my career. After enough fuck ups, I’ve learned that having someone tear apart my code in a PR is the best way to avoid bugs later.

It seems small, but I liked having the reminder in my face every time I opened a PR at Envato. In fact, I’ve adopted it on my team at A2 and they see it now, too.