Recently, I posted my doubts about the effectiveness of pull requests on LinkedIn. Surprisingly, my simple post led to a bonfire of discussions and eventually had over 350,000 views. I struck a nerve.

So, what is a pull request? Essentially, a pull request is a proposal to merge changes from one code branch to another. Other people working on the codebase review and discuss this proposal before integrating the changes into the other branch, usually the main one. This procedure allows collaborators to reason about the quality of the proposed changes and, in doing so, uphold the quality of the entire codebase.

Sounds straightforward, right?

Pull requests make perfect sense when you don’t trust the changes proposed to your codebase. The most common scenario is open-source projects. In open-source projects, anyone can suggest improvements to the codebase. This is precisely how and why open-source works.

Open-source projects reap the wisdom of the crowd. As one of the authors of the open-source framework Easy.ts, I see this in practice every day. We don’t always personally know the people who propose changes, so we can’t always value their experience or personal preferences, which often are even a matter of personal taste.

This is where pull requests come in handy. They allow us to discuss people’s coding decisions before merging their code into our projects. It’s an excellent opportunity to share skills and create an understanding of different approaches.

Continued to read…