The Code Review Process at a Startup
Description
A popular meme featuring a still image of the character T'Challa (played by Chadwick Boseman) from the movie 'Black Panther'. Above the image, white text on a plain background sets up the scenario: 'Me: So who will review my code? Startups:'. The image itself shows T'Challa looking serious and holding up his hand in a prohibitive gesture, with the subtitled quote '"We don't do that here"'. The meme humorously critiques a common stereotype of startup culture, where formal processes like code reviews are sometimes skipped in the rush to build and ship products quickly. For experienced developers, it's a relatable and often painful joke about the trade-offs between speed, code quality, and the accumulation of technical debt in high-pressure environments
Comments
12Comment deleted
In a startup, the code review is done by the users in production. It's the most brutally honest feedback loop you'll ever get
Our “code-review” checklist: 1) git push --force, 2) wait for PagerDuty - production is the diff viewer
The same startup six months later: "We need to hire a senior engineer to untangle our codebase" - turns out the real code reviewer was production all along, and it left very detailed feedback in the form of incident reports
At a startup, code review is asynchronous and distributed: production reviews it, customers file the comments, and you address the feedback during the incident retro
Ah yes, the startup engineering maturity model: Stage 1 is 'We don't do code reviews,' Stage 2 is 'We really should do code reviews,' and Stage 3 is 'We're hiring a VP of Engineering to implement the code review process we should have had from day one.' By Stage 4, you've accumulated so much technical debt that your entire sprint is just reviewing the code you shipped without review in Stage 1. The real kicker? That dismissive hand gesture becomes your CTO's signature move when junior devs ask about testing strategies, documentation standards, or why the production database has a table called 'temp_final_v3_actually_final_this_time.'
Startup code review: delegated to prod; postmortems are the only required approvals
Pre‑PMF workflow: branch protection lives in Notion, and code review is the PagerDuty notification that comments on main five minutes after deploy
Startup code reviews: optional until the Series B technical due diligence uncovers the monolith
You do it yourself Comment deleted
The neat part is... you don't! Comment deleted
Exactleu Comment deleted
git push origin master -f Comment deleted