 |
Tech Lead JournalAuthor: Henry Suryawirawan
Great technical leadership requires more than just great coding skills. It requires a variety of other skills that are not well-defined, and they are not something that we can fully learn in any school or book. Hear from experienced technical leaders sharing their journey and philosophy for building great technical teams and achieving technical excellence. Find out what makes them great and how to apply those lessons to your work and team. Language: en Genres: Technology Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it Trailer: |
Listen Now...
#231 - Faster Code Reviews, Faster Code Shipping with Stacked PRs - Greg Foster
Episode 231
Monday, 1 September, 2025
Are long code review cycles killing your engineering team’s velocity? Learn how top engineering teams are shipping code faster without sacrificing quality.In this episode, Greg Foster, CTO and co-founder of Graphite, discusses the evolution of code review practices, from the fundamentals of pull requests to the future of AI in code review workflows. He shares the secrets behind how the Graphite team became one of the most productive engineering teams by leveraging techniques like small code changes and stacked PRs (pull requests).Key topics discussed:The evolution of code review from bug-hunting to knowledge sharingBest practices for PRs and why small PRs get better feedbackHow stacked PRs eliminate waiting time in development workflowsThe rise of AI in the code review processWhy AI code review works best as an automated CI checkHow Graphite achieves P99 engineering productivityHiring engineers in the age of AI-assisted codingTimestamps:(00:00) Trailer & Intro(02:21) Career Turning Points(05:11) Now is The Golden Time to Be in Software Engineering(09:08) The Evolution of Code Review in Software Development(14:59) The Popularity of Pull Request Workflow(21:01) Pull Request Best Practices(26:17) The Stacked PR and Its Benefits(34:07) How Graphite Ships Code Remarkably Fast(40:03) The Cool Things About AI Code Review(45:23) Graphite’s Unique Recipes for Engineering Productivity(50:55) Hiring Engineers in the Age of AI(55:31) 2 Tech Lead Wisdom_____Greg Foster’s BioGreg Foster is the CTO and co-founder of Graphite, an a16z and Anthropic-backed company helping teams like Snowflake, Figma, and Perplexity ship faster and scale AI-generated code with confidence. Prior to Graphite, Greg was a dev tools engineer at Airbnb. There, he experienced the impact of robust internal tooling on developer velocity and co-founded Graphite to bring powerful, AI-powered code review to every team. Greg holds a BS in Computer Science from Harvard University.Follow Greg:LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/gregmfosterX – x.com/gregmfosterEmail – greg@graphite.devGraphite – graphite.devGraphite X – x.com/withgraphiteLike this episode?Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/231.Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.Buy me a coffee or become a patron.
