Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

11 Nov 2017, 7:14 a.m.

Video of Our PyGotham Play

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2017 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

You can now watch the 22-minute video of the play I discussed last month. "Code Review, Forwards and Back", co-written by and co-starring Jason Owen and me, directed by Jonathan Galvez.

Thanks to:

  • Kenneth Durril for running sound
  • David Beazley for running lights (on a few hours' notice and with no rehearsal)
  • A. Jesse Jiryu Davis for a cameo as a junior engineer, and for introducing the play
  • Jonathan Galvez for directing (if you're in NYC and looking to hire a director for a thing like this, ask me for his email address)
  • Michael Rehse for a ton of useful advice
  • Laura Hampton for serving as a dramaturg during late rehearsals
  • The PyGotham organizers for accepting the talk and advising us on logistics and tone
  • Our audience, especially attendees who told us they'd liked it

We were happy to hear people say things like I'm new to the industry, and this helped me learn things to watch out for or I used to be that reviewer and I'm trying not to be anymore or My name is Randall and I never hear my name in fiction and it was nice to hear you say my name or I don't code at all but this is a marvelous management parable. Indeed, code review is just a particularly visible moment where you can see the effects of an organization's culture and processes. Too execution-focused (the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing)? Too alignment-focused (we're taking so much time deliberating and gaining consensus that we can't make forward progress on the mission)? Too lax, or too superficial, in enforcing rules? Our play can't dive into every scenario but it's a start. And -- the most frequent comment we got from happy attendees -- it was a change of pace (no slides!).

We're revising the play and submitting this a few other places; once it's run its course, we'll be posting the text of the script online.